“This is the way”

“This is the way – A Poem About Scam Victimization”

A Song by Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.

Music & Lyrics Copyright © 2026 – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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LYRICS

This Is the Way

When the bright lie breaks and the borrowed face
Falls from the dream you carried through the night,
When love turns ash in its remembered place
And every trusted star has lost its light,
Do not ask darkness where the morning lay.
Stand in the wreckage. Look. This is the way.

This is the way through names that were not names,
Through honeyed words that hardened into knives,
Through photographs, promises, invented flames,
Through all the counterfeit and borrowed lives.
You cannot walk around what yesterday
Has planted in your heart. This is the way.

Read what was done, and learn the hidden art
By which the liar entered thought through trust,
How hope was made a doorway to the heart,
How love was shaped, then shattered into dust.
Knowledge is not cold comfort cast in gray;
It lights the road ahead. This is the way.

Think of the moments now without the whip
Of afterward, which knows what then could not.
Return to every word, each turning ship,
And see the hidden mechanisms of the plot.
Not “I was weak,” nor “fool,” nor “easy prey,”
But “Now I understand.” This is the way.

Write down the storm before the storm writes you.
Give grief a name and anger somewhere safe.
Put black on white what you believed was true,
And let the scattered pieces find their shape.
The hand can teach the haunted mind to stay
Beside the truth it learns. This is the way.

And speak, though speaking shakes the wounded ground.
Come from the room where shame has locked the door.
There are other voices carrying the sound
Of hearts that broke upon this coast before.
Sit with them. Listen. Answer. Come what may.
Do not disappear. This is the way.

There will be mornings when the old grief wakes
Before your eyes have opened to the sun,
And nights when memory circles, claws, and aches,
Demanding once again what cannot be undone.
Recovery is not one glorious day
When sorrow dies forever. This is the way.

It is the thousand ordinary things:
The page you read when you would rather flee,
The thought examined for the lie it brings,
The truth you write though truth brings misery,
The chair you take among the ones who stay,
The small return to life. This is the way.

No trumpet sounds when judgment comes restored.
No mountain moves because you trust again.
You simply find one day you crossed a ford
That once seemed deeper than the deepest pain.
You look behind and see how far away
The farther shore has grown. This is the way.

The thief took money, promises, and time.
The thief took futures never meant to live.
But there are territories past the crime
No fraud, however cruel, can make you give.
Your mind can learn. Your heart can disobey
The ghost that says you’re lost. This is the way.

And you will learn that grief itself can change,
That what once roared becomes a distant sea,
That memory can remain without the strange
Command that every memory used to be.
The past stays past. The present learns to stay.
The future opens slowly. This is the way.

Do not demand the person you once were.
That road has vanished underneath your feet.
You are not walking backward into her
Or him, or them, before deceit.
You walk toward someone formed from every day
You chose to rise and learn. This is the way.

And should another darkness find your door,
As darkness finds all houses given time,
You will not meet it as you did before,
Unarmed before the unexpected climb.
You will remember mountains do not say
How high you are until you climb. This is the way.

So when you cannot see the journey’s end,
And when the road is broken, steep, and long,
Read. Think. Write. Participate. Attend.
Return until the practice becomes strong.
Not because someone orders you obey,
But because healing needs a path. This is the way.

There is no shame in traveling slowly home.
There is no failure in a wounded pace.
The sea takes time to smooth the shattered stone;
The dawn takes time to show the mountain’s face.
But step by step, and day by stubborn day,
The road becomes your own.

This is the way.