Tug at my heartstrings
Play them like a harp
till I bleed light blue tears
This horizon stains my chest
A mark I do not regret, resembling
The light orange streaks in my eyes
As the view becomes crystal clear
Teach me the truth that can only be spoken through seeing
Extend your arm out to me
the way the wind carries the clouds like a wave past us
A silent prayer I send up
help me to unlearn everything I thought I knew
Take this weight off my chest
Let the emptiness scare me
to wonder if I'm rising
up into vast empty sky

Change of pace

To be honest, I love the way my life is going.
Waking up in the morning on my own time, focused and ready for classes.
No one to impress, and I couldn't care less that my classmate thinks I'm cute.
Walking on campus and no one calls out my name, or interrupts me from where I was going.
I am free to go where I want to, and if I take a wrong turn there is no one to tell me otherwise.
He can visit me, too. But no one knows me and we can quietly sit and talk on a bench together in the shade without later hearing any rumors or suspicions from any passerbys.
I am judged by the content of my diction, the kindness of my manners, and the work ethic I follow.
I can walk into the library between classes and calmly dedicate those hours to finish my work ahead of time.  I don't have to even look at my phone unless I feel I want to or I have my mother to answer to.  I come home at the time I see fit-(still in daylight!) and I can spend my time freely relaxing or if I am inspired from already seeing the finish line, get ahead before I have to.
I actually make plans on the weekends only with the people that I want to see and I follow through with them.  I don't check on anybody or waste time online because the people that matter will reach me through the phone. Designated a safe haven for my thoughts no anxiety can reach me here.
Pursuing the interests I had already given up on- who would've thought I'd sign a modeling contract. 
I can truly be me, I can truly work on me, and if I do not wish upon a certain morning to work on me- that is also fine I can simply work on my future.
A fool once told me I am not strong enough for the life of a loner- knowing no one and depending on no one, but I have never felt more lucky or blessed.

Never have I rested so comfortably upon the thought of another person's face who is not family
Who is not fruit of the earth upon which my mother gave birth to me
That instead belongs to foreign lands I have long dreamed of
On a day I know you'll be thinking of me least
Everything feels like it wants to clash together today
And I hear you everywhere

The pressure and this cold in my chest
This is something I can't say
So many things
All these thoughts weighing me
A pressure I try to be transparent to
So it finds it's way inside me
A plane turned to a triangle caved piercing my insides

Why did I suddenly end up running into him today?
Why couldn't I stop thinking of you this morning?
Why is everything clashing together today?
What will be left for tomorrow?

I don't understand, I don't understand,
but I'm learning to love you day by day.
I don't understand
but I'm forging happiness sooner each day.

My heart is made of glass but
I've mastered levitation
The pieces are still held together
With every jab on every side
I feel like God is handing me life on a platter
And I only realize it's edible once it spoils
But I haven't yet figured out how to eat it.
And I wonder if I ever will.

I don't want to lose you,
that is my foremost thought today.
I don't want to lose that smile
That I will now close my eyes and rest upon.

Happy Mother's Day

As I stood there alone in the quiet water dripping down on me

It all led me to stop my left foot down in anger, and scream so loudly inside my head

mother it hurts me so much that you hate yourself

Why was that the thing. . . wanting to come out of my mouth?
When just last night

I told myself 

I hated you

Mother, I didn't understand why two nights ago I tried telling you all my worries and my plans, trusting you for the first time in so long.

It was two hours that I spoke - and you conversed.

Yet last night you dared to insinuate
that everything I told you that night was crap, and the only thing you cared to remember was that I was sick with a fever.

I, I just don't understand, how you can be so cold when I need you yet you want me to believe you love me.  I don't understand why you try to make me cry when I've done nothing wrong.

But here in this moment I understand.

And I try not to feel sad as I know that the reason for my enlightenment now is a friend who betrayed me in the same.

Mother, you are everyone who's ever disrespected me.

and I no longer feel sorry for myself for being the one to have a mother like you.

Mother, I'm sorry you're so insecure in yourself. Mother, I'm sorry you've lived your life blaming yourself over being imperfect

It all started that day you decided to get knocked up by your deadbeat cousin, because his inability to provide for himself guaranteed you a lifelong marriage.

That was the day when your true colors showed.

And now I know, through all those years of trying to forget the bruises and the pain,
 it's still all the same. 
As long as I live here with you I see every way in which it is the same. 
In these few hours of God-given clarity, I want to see as much as I can so that I do not forget.
Just like that morning I was thirteen, you first offered me to wear concealer and foundation.

I walked proudly into school with the purple circle the size of a fist on my left eye. From him.

I walk proudly today knowing colors fade, but truth prevails.

And as I stand here with my head to the floor, weeping and screaming. I promise that this time I'm strong enough and I'm finally old enough that I won't look away.  I won't try to forget for the possibility of reconciliation and an easier future.  I always angered my self every time I saw through the deception I placed trying to fool myself into happiness.

You masking this hatred of men, and your lifelong struggle of turning it into hate for yourself.
I will never forget, I am finally strong enough to live with this reality without letting it torture me.  Nothing can touch me right now, nothing within me is against me right now.

In this moment I fear nothing.  

                Listening to the sadness of a song of heartbreak as a child.  The vastness of an ocean on a caribbean sunset. Death. The cold in a lone night.

I remember these so well. Yet they seem so distant from me.

In this moment I hate nothing. Not my long labia, nor the small gap between my two front teeth, nor the traces of purple always under my eyes. All these things I wanted to change, I longer see the need. . . Nor the curl of my natural hair, nor the sound of my voice, nor the under-pronation in my feet. Not my past. And in this moment, I hate Nothing outside myself.

My chest feels smooth like a wall of white marble, much like the wall right in front of me.  Yet I see nothing physically in front of me.

I feel perfect, I feel whole.  and I feel nothing but this .  Despite the wet hair on my unclothed back, the pale seeping onto my face I do not recognize.

I could stay in this recording of Chet Baker almost blue, just smiling at myself in the mirror, all night.
But this is a new soundness to my existence.
For I, refuse to forget in comfort. I, refuse to soothe the tears on my heart to a slumber.  I refuse to hide my chest from the cold of the night sky piercing through me.
And as I try to order these thoughts as though they were a sequence of events, I realize each is my arm.  Which comes first; the right or the left?  Are you sure?
All of these are parts of who I truly am, today,

The warmth of my bare bosom
The cold strands across my shoulders
This is the truth

I will never be weak.  I will never be weak again.  I can't. It isn't me.  and I'm not you.
and yet because of this, I'm happy enough to love you.

feel breathe Run

I want to feel
    Inside my chest
        With every breath I take
              The spaces where air resides
                     The cold rushing in to my larynx
                            Stretching out my alveoli with each
                                    Deep diaphragmatic contraction and the
                                              Serenity in each emptying of my warmth
                                                      Or perhaps the bloody taste of iron rising
                                                                 Almost past the tip of my confusion run
                                                                         Through that cold cloudy day and the pain
                                                                                That burned my chest passed my throat and
                                                                                          Unable to breathe I knew I had ran my best then
I want to breathe the same today
Relive that memory
That taught me freedom from limitations
Comes through the pain of tearing away
Of body tissues through hard pain
And muscle fibers lost
Replaced by strength tomorrow
I long for this purity of standing alone and being content with the strength creating a new piece of me
I know not how to stand in a place shared without surrendering my whole transparent soul
I want nothing more than feeling the fleeting pain burning as though a pillar of unity with me
Pledging to torment me forever then fleeing with a promise of return
The consuming darkness of your breath withheld as your temple is brought tempting to touch mine
The empty mind activating my subconscious to move even while my stopped breath holding chest up
I do not wish to become breathless if our lungs were to synchronize and this shared space your breath
Blackened the transparency of my soul cutting off the oxygen allowing me to remember to run
I want to run
Alone
                                         Frivolous waves of shared air color my chest
                         I desire to feel that feared pain once again
        And right now this will repeat until something changes

すべて は うつくしい, something I dreamed of long ago

It is the imperfections of your being that reflect so boldly accurate, parallel to mine
The minute corners
                                made of the dust of our crumbled heart bits
                                                                                                     where the cracks concluded
The ones now materialized into those infinitesimal details you seemed to disregard,
but instead to me showed beauty in the brokenness of life.

Like fireflies lined up in a serene field of sparse grass
They adorn the path
                                 that shows me where we go
                                                                               as you spin around in small circles
As thought watching your back, blindly looking for me

The cracks in your heart and the outline they make
     I feel at home                              attempting to nestle in them as though my mother's womb
I trace them as I dance in awe of the scenery,
Misty twilight revealing far-off virgin trees and excitement anticipating to be discovered
                                                                           something I thought would only be seen in dreams

Is it I who is blind in entrancement, not realizing what you have seen?
But I would not be disappointed at your denseness
It is one more detail destined. Will be engraved at its falling along this road

Yet I know there is a reason you choose to be here. . . 

I dance along these as something resonates within me

Are you alive is my existence a dream?

Breaking me down, everything I see surrounding me
The suspense I've held in my chest for so long,
From the wavering of the circumstances that led me, to us here
                                      become shattered armor on the floor
                Embrace me, all that I embrace.

He lives.

Scars are something to be proud of, showing this is what you've endured, 

to say that this if the magnitude of pain you've felt and in spite of this you lived

Just like the resurrected Jesus showed the holes in his hands to Thomas

and Though it was great enough to kill him, he lives.

My head bowed down weary

apr4,12
This is me and mine alone, the serenity that no one will understand
the plain fact that you're here; you're the one that's here
With my head bowed down weary
These white wings become revealed to you
This white pillar of light passing through my head to my chest and these bruised fragile hands you brush softly with your fingertips.
these thoughts running through my head over and over
surrounded by this white, that only you can see
this black night in which no one could touch me 
where my scared, cold soul sunk into my chest
seeing this black surrounding it as though my body itself hadth become part of the dead night 
I find this white, these wings I thought I had burned enveloping me and you the same. These gentle strong hands healing the bruising on mine.    I am alive.

Red Rose

Long ago I felt it
            I thought       just a dream

that photograph of a grey set sky,
                        those deep blue eyes
and that red jewel of a heart
           with my name written on his chest
you promising me the same

wide-eyed here I contemplate the serenity
I'll never forget the song playing
               walking down that hilly street
as though morning was just awakening
                        from the sparse dew on the green leaves
Today is just the same, as a guitar string is plucked inside my heart
   when I remember you   but
I will not surrender, and this song will guide me through

I will find that man with the tattoo             of a red rose and
 I will place my name on his heart

I believe

I believe everything happens for a reason.
I believe better things are still to come.
I believe my constant hardship are not my weakness.
I believe going through more than others accredits me as stronger
because God gives you what you can handle.
I believe you lose people you love so that there will be space for those you will love more.
I believe the blood of Jesus Christ permits me to boast in my weakness, for upon him I stand.
I believe you're given what you need so you can work hard to get what you want.