It’s been months since I’ve written.
Now, with a shaking hand and bruised ribs,
an unforgiving mind and a whirlwind of words unwritten,
I’ll put my thoughts back on paper. Where they come from.
I want to write, I told a coworker. When I’m older.
But it’s been months since I’ve been able-
to afraid to think and too thoughtless to write,
pushing through life like a Halloween corn maze, constantly lost, yet never knowing
How or Why or Where or When.
But I feel I can- hope I can,
know I will.
So, though it’s been months since
a single word came out,
I’m taking my brain and spilling it out-
out for the world to see?

Sometimes I’d rather be invisible
than be ****** in the spotlight.
No one expects the world,
when you’re living in your own.
So sometimes I’d rather be invisible,
then be noticed. Known.

It’s scary what a smile can hide.
Especially when someone’s dying inside.
They super glue on a grin,
and even when its thin-
No one sees what they’re trying to hide.

Broken crayons still color the same.
I mean- isn't that really the aim?
Finish coloring the big picture-
our life picture.
We're all crayons,
or markers, paint perhaps.
Everyone's a little bent,
cracked. Snapped,
in some way shape form.
It's really kinda the norm
nowadays.
But in a box full of crayons-
when they are used, when they live-
they snap. They crack.
They break.
But they still work, just the same.
It may be a bit tougher for them-  
but they're tougher from it.
We're tougher from it.
We're all broken crayons
filling in our own life line.
But broken crayons still color fine.

She had a hippie happy heart,
and a giant gypsy soul.
She cared too much about too much,
and she wandered without a goal.
 
She had a lofty lover’s heart,
and was barely not breaking at the bones.
She loved too much, far too much,
but the cracks it caused were never shown.

She had a shattered spirit and a smile,
and a charlatan shine in her eyes.
She was real- too real, for this world,
and oftentimes, it was just too hard to get by.
 
She had weeping wings on her back.
And tracks of tears under her skin.
She tried. She tried. She tried, too much.
And it hurt. So she cut off her wings.
 
She’d had a future of flying in her vision,
but the tendrils in her touch tied her down.
So she gave up her hopes and her ambitions.
And she stayed- where she was stuck- on the ground.

I swear,
you are some kind of mystery,
locked in a box.
And for some reason,
you’ve handed me the key.
Yet I don’t know how locks work.

Neighborhood streets in Arizona,
dead of fall. Everything looks dead.
Hardly colorful, pretty, exciting.
Just dead.
The nights never were too cold, though,
so we still wandered the roads.
Messy hair. Bare feet. Dead of night. Dead of fall.
Nowhere really, to go.
Knowing not to expect snow,
rather things… still dead?
still sleeping. Lying in wait, for a change.
The bi-monthly occurrence of rain,
bringing that smell, so much stronger there,
than anywhere else I’ve been.
And my best friend and I,
with our bare feet, messy hair and grins,
would go out and dance in the rain.
People called us crazy, weird,
hypothermia in the making.
But we danced.
Life was hard, so we turned to rain,
she was losing a sister to a terrible man.
I was visiting home, back
from an unwelcoming land.
It was difficult. So we turned to rain.
In the dead of dead fall,
and we danced.