You are not the pages of a book, though you breathed them. If you were, upon closing, we would no longer experience you. You are a never-ending poem, the graceful break of a reckless wave. You are a perfection that loves--a perfection that we don't have to tire ourselves striving for.  You tell us to be still, knowing that you are God.  Your love is three dimensional but it only requires one to accept it.  And yet, it confounds us because You are simple goodness and we are the product of overthinking.

You chase the blessing without the lifestyle,
You want the power without the prayer cycle,
You talk about God when you need saving,
Then ignore his ways, when your ways need paving.
A true believer knows we don't have to wait,
Because the son came down and opened heaven's gate,
God called us to reign as kings,
Whoever is free in Me is free indeed.
The enemy came to destroy, steal, and ****,
The Son overcame Him, so we may have joy in His will.
With authority comes responsibility,
With the cross comes bearing.
Love requires truth,
And truth requires changing ,
So stop trying to amend God because your life needs rearranging.

Slips of time,
Stolen by,
The frustrating cry of empty space.
Just 3 words, just 3 breaks,
The clock ticks by,
I see your face.
Skin for every pocketed minute,
A strand of hair for each delayed train,
A minute here, A minute there,
An hour lost in anywhere.
Slips of time,
Stolen by,
A friend from a better place.
You're with me always in places I refuse to see,  
Teaching me to tune a better melody.

Father, forgive me for dressing myself in the shackles that you tore off.
Father, forgive me for trying to bear past burdens along with your cross.
Father, forgive me for breaking waves when you asked me to tread water.
Father, forgive me for wearing Shame when you already bought her.

You said you were the one
You said that  you were it
But you were wrong
You claimed I needed to be with you
So I clung to you
I needed you to simply be
Because i thought that you were me
I thought living was inside my head
I thought performance was winning
And equated with existence.
Every part of you is not me
Though I've grown with you
And traced you back to the age of three
You are not me but merely a distraction
From seeing the ethereal before me
From living out the plays inside my head
From conforming to the reality that attention is not needed
Recognition is not imperative
Success is not vital
To live extraordinarily.
You are just a distraction from who I need to be
And as I fall and trip and stumble back into the pleasure of your continuous movie reel
I see the world and I see me and I remember the presence of who I am supposed to be
All in the moments that you are not there
And still I struggle
But I know now that you are not who I was destined to be,
And maybe I’m not special
Or all i thought I’d be
But with you, I’ll never reach my dreams
And I’ll never reach me
Until I hit pause on the remote
And eject this fantasy DVD.

Poetry is not these words;
Its the breath we live by.
Its not the ink that kisses each heartbroken thought with fullness,
But the way we choose to see,
the way we choose to breathe,
the way in which we reside:
A love given unable to return
A song that cannot be unsung
and praise that requires no song to dance.
This is life.
This is worship.
This is love.
This is poetry.

How God, are you so good-
that you have filled me in this way?
That I want to overflow,
Even in my deepest pain.

My tears, they flow,
But my spirit knows-
That everything will be okay
Because countless times, you’ve made a way.

My eyes may weep,
But in joy, I’ll sleep
Because you have filled my every need.

My flesh may fail
My surface breaks
But my core has yet to shake

How God, are you so good
That you laid your life for me
You emptied your cup
To fill mine up
And this I sing with glee.

Beauty, i've realized, is not confined to one singular moment
Nor one singular place.
Not one precious moment in time but perhaps a web of them.
It's intrinsic to nature.
Confounded through and possibly limited by the dullness of people.
We need too much.
We desire emptily.
We set definitions leaving little space for the outlier.
But beauty, in its purest form, is the outlier--a great composition of them.
For what we set our eyes forth to blatantly, routinely, and  mundanely is often the most beautiful, masked by our innate desire for novelty.

Sealed letters are hard to tear open
They will never be as perfect as they were before they were broken
The contents will never be revealed without crinkle or mar
Only by rough edges is how we become who we are
The only way to reach gifts unknown is to tear the seal little by little
Is that supposed to be metaphorical?
real love is not known till one suffers real pain
If it does then i don't want it and i'd like to leave the contents unnamed.

I’m shaking
Something radiates from the inward out
It's spiritual but not beautiful
These words aren't even beautiful anymore
I'm just a display
I wish i'd never met you
So this broken spirit could go away
I know i've tasted true love but i've also tasted real pain
Without you i'd never be the same
Never be the same in the way my spirit would not be broken
My heart would be sublimely bent on heaven
You're not real love, all you cause is pain
What your “love’ taught me is not worth the heartache

I’d never touched the surface of the moonlight.
Shades of green bathed in milky light covet the stars of their shine.
What if there were no more comfort? No more tv to drown out the anxiety of our sin. No more facades canarying plastic joy into our utter isolation. I stand on the dark side of the moon. That's not grass, it's the grocery store, and that's no moon, it's the simple light glazing the forefront of endless milk jugs. All is real and fake and melded to the imagination of our subconscious desires. Milk is evil, and ******* is the gateway to heaven. We’ll never see what our habits blind the truth to, or what our spirits refuse to believe. I stand in this aisle, and I see God. But six people walked away from Him.

My heart breaks in seventeen different directions.
The white realm between my eyes glares back at me
Initially, I think he’s trying to hurt me
Forcing me to stay
But then hope effervesces in 1 new direction
Up, out.
Stay and feel he says
You need to heal he says
He's just a mar stapled upon a pure surface
He's just blank and broken
Clean and vast and warm and open
And can’t I be this wall
And can’t I just be free
From all this pain that's hindering me
“Stay” he says
“You'll never be the same” he says
And so he holds me
Compelling me to stay in the most rugged of places
Shifting when its time for me to move forward
He wasn't trying to hurt me
He just wanted to help me
Relieve the scar I painted for myself
When I cast my burdens upon the shelf
And never bothered to look
Never bothered to feel
And chose to reject what was so devastatingly real
I’m enamored by this blank space
I’m mesmerized by my own old pain
I want to leave but I finally listen and stay
The white wall becomes me
We hold each other’s gaze
And we stay and feel and then move away
To a new pose where the false okayness
Is really okay.

Isnt America supposed to be united
Yet instead over Iran we become divided
And that ain’t just it
Nearly every issue
we are split
Romans 12:5 says we are one
But you offend me so then we’re done
Jesus  called us to unite and serve him
To love our neighbors and not destroy them
But I’m not talking about our foreign affairs
I don’t have your political view
So you sit and glare
You preach about loving each other’s differences
But when my uniqueness offends you
Our friendship diminishes
Romans 12:5 says WE are one
But the we You see is the we you don’t want it to be because she’s telling the truth so she can set you free
Set you free from the ways that hinder you
You want to true love but when it finally comes you can’t see through
Through the veil that world has woven
You preach false love and we need to take it back to Romans
You know how to love from afar
But when it gets real and our opinions are different you say it isn’t love at all
Real love stays if you think abortion should be legal
Real love stays even if I’m conservative and you’re liberal
I was never trying to enforce my views
But if I can’t talk why can you
And I get it, often times people tell you to shut your mouth
But one isn’t all you said that yourself
But what do I know
I’m just white trash shoving the Bible in your face when I don’t know your place
But you don’t know mine either or where I’ve been
Yeah a lot of Christians are fake
But my love is  genuine

You plant unreachable images in my head
Willing me to paint
My hands though they work they wither
Much like heavens notions taint
Though I strive I’ll never reach you
For your face is much too great
Vast with perfection
And I think I’ve grasped a taste
Yet I’m farther than where I’ve been
For you have turned your face
My hands dance with fervor
Across this painted page
Flicking ideals far and wide
Desperate  to meet you
Hungry  to be lifted high
Alas my brush has found you
Then you shift your gaze
Revealing a new angle
And once  again my fingers race

My light:
Dappled in the rearview mirror,
cracked at the surface.
I am bruised but not broken.
Scarred,
But i still have my  foundation.
Bruises they heal.
Scars they scab over.
Hearts torn apart,
But in heaven they’re woven.
crinkled skin wraps around the sunlight,
Fingernails kissing the moon.
The light is there i just have to dig farther,
The light is there,
It's you.

My fingers tap against the keyboard. The stars linger above my cross-legged, country trance spilling across the indigo campfire sky. Jasmine ransacks my senses dazing my context of the red, wooden bridge, and my head tilts upward both in flowering pleasure and earnest reverence. The stars become you. We bathe in naked sunlight. The heavens fall to earth, and I capture its ecstasy  in bodiless waking moments.

Our hearts. They hug the heavens
Then I fall right back to you
We kiss the stars then grasp each other
And old weaves its way to new
The prophecy of a poet
Solomon breathes it true
My eyes. They look to heaven.
But my hands, they reach for you

The heavens buzz betwixt my finger tips, and the stars hover in my palms.
I can almost cradle them.
My fingernails waltz gingerly against its radiant light, and His presence rings silently around the room.
I’m on Mars.
He’s not speaking, but I can hear him.
  Lavender pulses blue through my veins and wraps my mind in stillness, but something is missing.
My heart.
My body sways in His present serenity.
Blue.
But my spirit is deaf and disconnected.
My mind is bent on the ethereal realm, but my body pulls against it towards you.
When she moans she talks to angels, but in her quiet she’s hugged in broken virtue.

Holy meditation. My fingers tap against the keyboard. The stars linger above my cross-legged, country trance spilling across the indigo campfire sky. Jasmine ransacks my senses dazing my context of the red, wooden bridge, and my head tilts upward both in flowering pleasure and earnest reverence. The stars become you. We bathe in naked sunlight. The heavens fall to earth, and I capture its ecstasy  in bodiless waking moments.

Everything pales in comparison to the nomothetic voices of the past. We flail and grasp for the tugs in our hearts hoping to capture inspirations heavy hand for the long while. Meanwhile our other hand struggles to cling to the past while. We endeavor to create the perfect alchemy in discovering the ways in which we can use the euphoria of our past to create the prospects of our future. Our hands are torn apart. Time is short. We lose the world we encounter to every fleeting moment. We reminisce and reminisce and soon the moment blindly pattering on our insides is gone. And she becomes nostalgia too.  Stop trying to extract the contentment of the past and realize its fullest in front of you. Realize every moment. Be mesmerized by its Singular beauty.

Yellow journal
Aged in fondness
Worn by the weight  of powerful words
Forgotten upon the shelf
Neglected despite your cheery shade
An artist leaves a piece of themselves within their art
A fateful discovery
Thats exactly what you are
Beaten up, broken,
torn weathered-
By years of dry land and drought of inspiration
Made alive by Christ
And awake in its pages
Your cover is worn
Your pictures dilapidate
But once you open up
Magic careens
Unveiled under your dusty pages is joy
Romance
Poetic trances
Art of divine nature
That is exactly what you are
Worn yet beautiful
Aged and reminiscent
Evoking fond warmth
You are the yellow journal
Beloved yellow journal

Dreams swelter into far off lands
Crushed or frozen
Alive or broken
Dreams liquify upon these brazen hands
Almost missing grasp caught by their last strand

I sang a wish to the angel in my room
She blew back cosmos from the moon
And sprinkled stars atop my head
Daring my dreams to dance outside my head

Love dressed herself up in lavish abundance over the course of two years then decided to be herself and stripped back to her nothingness. She paraded in Jealousy, tried on Heart-break, and even went through a phase with Anxiety before settling on her original lavishness. Love is fleeting. Love is nothing, and yet in the moment, she means everything. What's gone is never gone just unfit. All it takes is a reminiscent moment for love to spurn again.

You are a slave to that refrigerator
Rummaging its contents for your self-worth
consolation beckoning from its abundant shelves
You're in a relationship with that refrigerator
insecurely quelling yourself with the emptiness of the jarred-full shelves
You break up, you make up
starve-binge, starve-binge
yet absent in every bite and every purge is your self-love and self-worth
spirits do not hush at the flavor of delicacies
and with every neglected rumble, it shrinks more
your soul is broader than endless contents
and starved for complete contentment
not for empty contents
You mean more than the solid handles of that refrigerator
learn your worth.

The only love gained is the loss of it.
You're still mine, but my spirit convicts you're not.
The only way to say it is to say it.
My hand grasps emptily for your heart while your fingers intertwine with mine.
We thirst for an unfathomable security.
We chase love, yet disappointedly grasp wind.
We heart-wrenchingly stumble for a name that dies with the breeze.
What's ours will never be ours, not even ourselves.
And yet we pierce our own vitreous hearts denying our inevitable scarcity

Break me so I may begin again
high way climbing grasping ethereal ends eyes set forth to the heavens
trapped inside a doubt filled worry laden dream swirled head
Our fullest fragments allow us to shed our skin
When we are the most broken is when we begin

You taste the lips of a hundred fragmented men.
Boasting that your divine secularity exalts you a writer of better poetry.
The cries of 12 men are more artistic than the drabness of one.
You forgot to peek in to the kaleidoscope of every angle.
A ravaging between your thighs signals the only sense you have awakened.
It’s bellow so great it drowns out the miraculousness of every other sensation. Stuffing love’s nomothetic void with the resound of the broken cultured man.
Your prowess is not poetry, but the neglect of it.
Your myriad of lovers elicit the lack thereof.
Are you a tormented poet or is this simply a masquerade of whorery?
You drape the silk sheen around your shoulders and dial up the only poetry you have ever come to know.

We blindly type out of memorization,
We blindly write from practiced habit,
We blindly skip paragraphs, ignore articles, and pensively print upon the line without realization of what we’re saying at all.
We never truly see,
We deteriorate out of muscle memory
Absently offering an embrace neglecting to fully eyes-closed experience the wonderfulenss of it at all.
We go through the motions,
Dwelling in our minds straining its relation to our souls,
We no longer act in love,
But the muscle memory of it.
We look, but don’t truthfully see,
We touch, but forget to truly feel,
We hear, but we no longer listen,
We have flesh, yet we are merely programmed.
Advanced, but empty,
Knowledge unimaginable, yet still lacking,
Right, left, up, down, but do we realize the palpability and tenderness of the action?
Or are we too much on automatic?
In over drive,
That we forget to live out the littlest things and realize them to the fullest

You were a liar when you were little you’re a liar now
You’re lazy
You’re selfish
You’re a disappointment
You’re not worth furthering a friendship
You’re overly sensitive
You’re depressed
You’re insecure
You’re  anorexic
You’re not making any progress you are degressing  
This is the anthem rerunning in my head
Yet I harbor too much anxiety to end it
Too much fear to run away
And as I cry you stare straight through my face
Leaving me hunched over and neglected.

Life seeps through my frozen rendered winter heart,
Eyes blooming to the previously empty color,
Ice caps melt precipitating long-overdue art,
In spring I awaken, and joy I rediscover

Gardenias stretch their petals to the sky
Delight drifts through the air
Despondency and heartache wave goodbye,
Welcoming spring with all its whimsical wear

Spring means fresh, and chances anew
Affable spring, it is well with you

To love is to know,
And to know is to love ,
A bond sacred by intimacy,
Not birthed by erratic physicality.
No touch, no kiss, no hand I could hold,
Could warm the emptiness of my heart, so cold.
Two hearts torn
a broken hello from opposite sides of the world,
Our love simply lost, not permanently lorn.
Not by your kiss, not by your hold,
Will new love emerge from the fettered old.
I miss the warmth of your words
Their tantalizing embrace
Bonding immeasurable next to mere attraction of face.

I search for myself within you
Offering fear founded issues
Love must be embraced before shared
Through self-hatred I’ve evinced
Selfish care

Humanity is at the ****** of connection
Connection is plastered to our bones
It’s on our wrists dinging reminding us to take our steps that will apparently make us one with nature, it’s latched to our arms so while we are so spent attaching ourselves to nature that we don’t have to attach our phones to our hands, it’s our sun rise, it’s our evening prayer, heck it’s the only thing reminding us to wake up in the morning and connect with these people that we can only reach through these dull technological connections. Facebook says we’re here to help you connect! The Bible app dings remindign you, “keep in check!” You’re surrounded by connection, it immerses you and embraces you with its WiFi streamed arms and blue tinted light
But shouldn’t you be embracing the connection? Shouldn’t you be the one to swallow connection? Shouldn’t you be the one to amplify connection?
Humanity is at the ****** of connection but we are disconnected.. Shouldn’t the rate of depression fall not rise with every purchase of an iPhone. We are disconnected
From ourselves from nature from the spiritual realm and from each other because we connect our souls to these arguable objects of connection. Seems like we need an intervention from connection.  Shouldn’t connection flow within our bones and not simply be plastered to it? Connection is around us, but we’re not making the connection

I find myself in a series of rises and falls
Extreme to extreme,
my lows found cradled in an isolated ball
"Its lonely at the bottom", I scream from the top
riding down the euphoric tangent
Where I hit the bottom and stop
Tear stricken smile
a laugh shifts to a manic cry
inspired 4 days
inspired 1 day
discouraged more days
"maybe one day"
MAYBE ONE DAY
hope has arisen
the well fosters water
and with it, charismatic visions
CRASH BURN
I am my mother's daughter
"Oh to be on a good day," I reminisce from the bottom

Humanity is simplistic contrary to the complex, misunderstood, myriad of separately analyzed individuals that psychologists, artists, poets, and scientists paint it to be. Each person is labeled with a different disorder founded by their apparently personal past tragedies and harbors the wholehearted, mistaken, belief that they are alone in their “tragedy” which is indeed not tragedy but a side effect to the human condition, and arguably, to the optimist,  one of life’s sacred milestones. Humanity likes to romanticize these milestones. They dress up their societal deemed shameful past with cashmere sweaters, line their lips with the grief of loss, and sweep their eyes with trust issue mascara all in an effort to pronounce themselves worthy and prove themselves beautiful despite their “unique” past events and tragic flaws. But they are not unique. When you peel off the pearls, when you delete the username, when you strip away the added flair to each sad story, humanity is all the same. They all front loss of some sort, they’ve all battled insecurity, they’ve all woken up one day perhaps wishing they hadn’t woken up at all. They’ve all laughed, cried, chased after the fleeting ideal of love, and questioned its palpability. They’ve each found themselves in a situation that made them ponder their ability to ever trust again, if they could ever love again, if they could ever be the same again; but what they don’t realize is that they are all the same. Rough the personal and each person is the same, just with a different name. Step back and behold, these seemingly individual fallacies of the human condition all spin together to weave a simplistically complex web.

Depression reaved my friends
Coaxing them with her motherly apparition
Nurturing  their tears by plundering their motivation
Depression deceived my friends
Singing a sweet lullaby of anxiety and isolation
Cradling their meager hearts in her lonely hands
Depression was once my friend
But I cast-off her beguiling, love-robbing sham

I feel what I want people to see
But the gift to create is no longer in me
Purpose pounds at my jailed heart
But yet to escape is passion filled art

A love that hurts
A love that aches
A love that swells with dreams and plans
An end unknown, but hearts eternally bound
Rolling hills
Summer breeze
A love so deep it hurts to leave
Freedom in your eyes
Freedom in your speech
Freedom in our hearts and bonds unbreached

I find you in the wind
I find you in the  sun
I find you right beside me gazing at the sky above
Dreams intertwined with memories
I find you in my roots
I find you in my home
The lost feeling; sun down, long winding road
My past aligns with my future and you’re caught inbetween
In wistful memories,  my yearning future, and memory-like dreams

The oblivious night in need of salvation
The moon emits love to the night’s unaware starvation
We the stars, reflect that love in our light
An outlet of faith to the incognizant night

It is often claimed that the best of love is the sudden, unexpected kind
This love reveals itself recklessly like the storm after an almost peaceful stagnant calm.
But such a quick erratic love
Ruptures just as instantaneously as it comes
This love though so tempestuous
Deserts you with nothing but a memory sweet, yet impalpable and far-gone
An everlasting love is a drizzle crescendoing into a symphonic storm
A quiet infatuation, which like a blooming flower, harbors an innate need for nurturing
Infatuation can potentially be spun into love, which upon revelation, harbors a feeling so warm
Admiration always cradles the opportunity of this wild, consuming love
And the chance at this love knocks at everyone’s doors
But those who stroll through the drizzle differ from those who take shelter in familiar warmth
The hopeful, heartfull few, who don’t mind strolling through the light rain,
Possess the bounty of a doting and undying downpour.

I feel what I want to see
But the gift to create is no longer in me
Passionate flames engulf my heart
They want out, for all to see, as art
I know what others need to feel
But my heart has formed an unbreakable seal
My head pounds with the words I need to share
But When I reach for them they are not there

Lately I've been homesick
For the girl I used to be
Im in the same place with the same people
But the loneliness lays in me
I'm a hopeless romantic who's found love
Yet my heart has been ripped from my sleeve
Deep down, all the things I used to cherish have been shoved
The crazy, tea-drinking, book-reading girl is who I grieve
I'm a mere skeleton of the free spirit I was
I've been chasing a warm cozy feeling but it was never retrieved
For the home I've been feeling for is inside of me
My life may be onto better things but still I reminisce
For the girl who would so simply find bliss
My problems have been solved
So why does it hurt?
Maybe it's time
I put my heart back out onto my shirt

I am sick of being silenced
These chains wrapped around my voice won't break
By the time courage has woven around them
The words are lost and I have slipped into an anesthetic languor
I crave the feeling of the fire
But when I want it the flame is extinguished
And when it burns for me the chains snake around my brain and the words become jumbled
I have the fire in my heart and hands
But I no longer have the power to use them

Is this a feeling? Or is it a phase? Feelings are temporary but I've been isolated in this pain for so long I don't know how to live without it. I breathe fresh air and its foreign to my lungs for I've been drinking up this toxic tragedy too long

Sometimes a mess isn't a mess, but is just unorganized beauty

Maybe dying isn't so bad
I'm already living like I'm dead
I'm perpetually sad
The black slug of depression is weighing me
down like lead
I'm not who I want to be
I feel as though I'll never get there
If I could run from my problems I'd flee
& feel my problems become as light as air
But that's not reality
And deep down that's not me
So every night to God I pray
And keep fighting knowing in my future in joy I will lay

It is every emotion and no emotion. Like licking every lollipop at a candy shop or one giant brilliant combustion of all the colors into one color, or simply no color. To put it in exact words, love is a flavor bomb. just exploding through out your whole body as if it were your taste buds taking in every delicious bite of a candy bar. And while love may not come in normal flavors like chocolate and vanilla, it comes with its own bittersweet variety. It is a terribleness and loveliness mushed into one undefined yet glorious feeling. It is the sweeter part of sadness; the weightless relief you feel when all the tears have dried onto your flushed cheeks. It is the cause of your tear-stricken face at two am and every heaving sigh after you take a shaky breath. But it is also the pang of happiness you experience at the sudden thought of your unattainable lover. It’s the lurching in your belly at the sight of them walking in. Although there are infinite descriptions of love, in the end it is a promise. A promise not bound together by unsteady feelings, but by commitment. And that is the beauty in it all, because even after the “feeling of love” fades , the eternal swear you have made to that person , is more rare and beautiful than any feeling of “love” at all.

They say ink is poison,
But so is your touch,
So aren't these words,
Better than cuts?