In times of tragedy will there still be songs?
Aye, there will be singing
It will be about the dark times.

Do we all just resemble passing seasons?
Staying is not a part of our religion.

Let their words break upon you
as waves assault the cliffs
a foundation of bedrock
unbothered by the affairs below
iron-clad in will

It starts the same
Immortal, Eternal, Limitless
Yet existing only a moment
To be nothing and everything
To be in the world but not of the world
Both peasant and tyrant
Traitor and Thief
Kings and Queens
Flying but falling
Screaming in rage and weeping in grief
Running, Bolting, Irreparably damaged
Not everyone is so lucky to live
Fewer still give

Eh oui, c’est la dure réalité …

(The oceans are full of plastic)

Pouvez-vous m’aider?

(I could write about wars but which one?)

Ça te dit ?

(I use my passions as a form of escapism)

Faut pas casser du sucre sur le dos de quelqu'un!

(Is the sun exploding? Are workers being paid?)

Il faut croquer la vie à pleines dents.

(Am I ungrateful to want more?)

Freya
Shield-Maiden, Lover
Sister, Mother
Embraces owing
Life unfolding
Blessings upon the fiery hearth
Tears above
Love below: relieve our toil
Darkness ebbing
Rhyme unending
Listen to my bold tale!
Freya
Red hair flowing
Sunlight growing
Rising upon the hill
A song of springtime
Complete this bold rhyme
Hear now my tale!

Set out into the dark forest with newly picked flowers for the hearth, grasped within a meager coat. Clutched in bare hands and protected against her chest from the cold wind which blew so insistent. She was not far from the village when she met a woman on the road.

"A penny for your thought? A purpose for your soul?”

“I do not think so.”  

Mysterious crones on a lonely road.

“Perhaps mittens to keep an old woman’s hands warm?” scratched the voice of the Crone.

The girl who wished to be on her way produced one flower from her coat,  

“May the thorns keep your hands warm as they do mine.”

Fresh blood dripping from the open wound,
the Crone graciously accepted the rose.

“For this trouble” she said “I will return a favor of my choosing...for you did not give me what I asked... I give a warning. You may not know of such things, but on this night, in these hills is a crone not unlike me. When she asks a favor of someone, and they do not give it to her...she takes them, then buries them in her garden to make the spring come faster. She always asks for that which cannot be given. The snow cover and the full moon coming will sneak night upon you. Wherever you are heading you must stay the night. For if you travel back you will surely lose your way and find yourself food for the flowers.”

The girl who had been taught to be polite even to witches nodded and replied,

"Thank you for your gift.”

She headed on her way not believing a word of what the old Crone said.

Still this dread loom is woven with defeat. Even for the gods who would keep us safe from evil,  and guard us from death 'till the end of days was determined.

I say for us all in this song that after light had dropped, the first of the frost did melt.

Evacuate (verb) : remove (someone) from a place of danger to a safe place. To feel safer in the center of a hurricane than I do here. Safer when I step back into a body which I no longer fit in.  Cramped inside a small place which I no longer call home. My safe place has been completely stripped. Reconstructed to fit a person who never existed. Forcing myself to be a piece in the wrong puzzle. I simply to do not fit. No matter how much I shove and twist. I do not belong here. Each attempt always wrong.

I bleed
I pen poetry in that blood
I pen prose in that blood
No good without color
Never free from abuse
So relive it all
Weep for the pages
And write it for those who read
For them I bleed
Into the blank spaces I cannot mend
What a waste

Do you think the moon waits the whole night
Just to see the sun?
To share their stories with each-other
In the few moments they have together?

They were made for each-other
They make the other complete
Two halves of the whole,
Each a part of the others soul

Even when the moon faded away
The sun did not lose its reason to shine

There will always be stories
With one saying to another:
This is what it feels like to me
Can you understand what I am saying?
Does it feel the same to you?

It surprises me
I do not miss many people

Not in my heart,
Where the feeling swells
Like a delicate bloom
Rushing to fill the space
Between my skin

It has taken me so long
To abandon ambivalence
Walls streaked red
Which I have constructed around them

The way they look at me
Like they were truly listening
How they spoke to me
Without assumption

I’ve changed
Relearning the rhythm of my breaths
And perhaps some day you will take my balance
For I will show you a path
That we can walk together in silence

I think a part of you felt
That if you kept hurling stones
Eventually I’d use them to build a wall
And shut you out…

Once upon a time
I made myself small
So they could feel big
Told them they deserved
To take up more space
Mistakes were made
Hearts were broken
And being so small,
I was crushed underfoot

I am the Patron Saint of Lost Causes
Each time I let another set of teeth rip me open
(Again and Again)
****** maws and rotting flesh
Just so I can make poetry of it all.

The people I love are vultures
While I,
Some dead thing in a field—
No one cares what killed me
They are just here to take what is left.

(I don’t recognize love unless it eats me alive)

Isn’t love a kind of violence?
If we choose it, then it’s power.
(Again and Again)
Teeth marks around my neck.
This is power.

A hand in my chest,
Eyes hungry
For those I’ve lost,
I bled myself dry for you.

How do you expect me to stand on my feet when you keep striking at my ankles?

I don’t write for you
I don’t even write for me
It’s to make sense of the chaos
To greet each terror by name

I want to paint a neat narrative
Give it substance and form
Curse it with the burden of a name
Maybe then, it will make sense

It’s easy to convey pain
Difficult to transform it into art—

Here is how I hold the pen
Here is how the pen holds me
Here are my thoughts,
Over-steeped in empty fervor  
Here is everything and nothing

I learned to cry silently
To fear making sounds when I walked
So much of me is desperate
Not to disturb the peace
I suppose that’s the child in me

I grew up bitter and calloused
Keeping sharp edges around conversation
Because if I spoke harshly enough,
If I spoke concisely enough,
It would pierce the miasma around me

They told me not to take up space
That my thoughts didn’t matter
And so I learned to keep to myself
It hurt far less than rejection

We cling to loss
Not because we want them back
But because we drown in the emptiness
That comes with it.

I think of you often and I don't reprimand myself over it anymore. I've convinced myself that I occupy your thoughts just as much you occupy mine. That you too miss the friend you once had. That, like me, you know how inelegant and stupid our untangling was. Perhaps this is the only form of communication we have left.

Some day we’ll all be a little older
A little more weathered and restored
We’ll wake up and all this poetry will finally make sense.
Like a locked drawer underneath our ribs,
Fortuitously pried open by storm.

I remember you couldn’t even look at me.
And now I don’t even glance in recollection.
Nor do I speak of you,
Not even in the tiniest fragment.
We were always going to be storms colliding, heaving across the terrain.

Each person I have ever met
Has added to the tapestry of my soul
Some adding a single string
To the complexity of the whole

Sometimes strings lie in disarray
Their edges frayed at threads end,
The ghosts of my memories left behind
Woven into the fabric of my being  

To move forward
I face the torn edges of the past
And make peace with the imperfections
Added from each thread,
By integrating them into myself

“Some day I will write poems about this but first I must survive it.”

Give yourself permission to survive.

This is how art is made.

In the same way Van Gogh painted his Starry Night from the window of an asylum—

It was the safety of the cell,
And not his insanity,
That lifted the brush.

Never apologize for your art.

They loomed as gods when I was young
Tasked with shaping malleable clay
Instead of love, teaching pain
A childhood home never safe
Unhealed wounds festering for years
Distrusting myself and plagued by fear
Replayed scenes inside my mind
Apologizes I’d never receive
Inside my damaged heart
The place they haunt
Broken

Like Icarus
Too close
Too much

Do the stars weep for me?
Will the stars find me ruthless and calculated,
As so many jilted lovers?

Will they find me insatiable,
Like those I have taken, had, and refused?
Will they call me cruel?
For melodic tunes played on tugged heartstrings?

Will the stars weep for me?
My wretched form and bruised heart,
Beating like so many others
Under an unforgiving spotlight

When your roots are shallow
The slightest breeze
Can blow you away

The intimate act of showing the one you love your unfinished art says to them:

“Like my unpolished heart, I trust you with this.”

Even apart,
I have not felt disconnected from you

Don’t disappear
Without coming back
Once more whisper to me soft things
Stay to see how proud of you I might be
If you told me everything
And how incapable I am of being upset with you

I have never stopped writing for you
It has just become sadder over time
Lingering on your every word
Hanging myself on each labored breath
Look at what you’ve done
My captive heart still belongs to you

So many words unsaid
Places never reached
Memories we wish to erase

I want to be enough
To be bright enough
To burn hot enough

To make only acceptable errors
Nothing more

Would I be enough
Were my wit sharper
And my thoughts less scattered

Would I feel your smile upon me then?

What do you do when you lose a soul mate?

Not necessarily the romantic type but the judgement-free, kindred spirit.

The one whose soul seemed to understand the fabric mine was made from. That whatever hand knit the fabric of your existence and whichever thread was used to weave your destiny in the world, perhaps brushed against the thread used to stitch mine together.  

I thought that I was yours,
And you mine.

Our threads so perfectly entangled,
That only the sharpest of instruments could separate. And even if we had been careful or courteous, surely it would have nicked our hearts.

Perhaps there exists no thread of life or fate strong enough to stitch us back together.

What would you have me do then?
Which groups exists to support those like us? Are songs written for those like us?

We were not broken up with or cheated on even though it has left us feeling broken and cheated.

What reparations should I make when something has been irreversibly damaged? Who will be left to clean up these pieces?

Who would write a tragedy like this?

Each time this feeling of emptiness sinks into my chest, I find myself thinking of you.

To be understood completely, even in silence– no one had ever allowed me that before

Is sadness just another precious thing you have given to me?

Come see this menagerie
The traumas and fears which once steered me
Put on display and stored behind glass
Like wild beasts, for you dear reader to see

I compare you to an old injury
Like those maimed by war
Or survivors of natural disaster
Something to be endured

I struggle to reconcile the conflict in my heart
Because in both times of war and peace
Heartbreak is the same

Loving you was like spilled glitter.
Trying so hard to clean it up,
But traces of it remain everywhere.
Spreading into every part of my being
And just when I think it's finally gone,
I find a little bit in cracked corners of my heart

I tell the night my secrets
And make love to the moon
I write letters to the stars
In the hopes they make it to you

I am well practiced in the art of heartache
Fluent in the language of grief
Versed in the routine of melancholy

I walk through this life marred by loss

Each day representing my triumphant victory over every obstacle existence has thrown at me

For love?
For love I would do anything
I love in the same way the oppressed go to war
It is never in half measures

I’ve been told each bad poem
Lays the foundation for the next
Each satisfactory one
Tracing its genealogy
Through myriad failures

People have always been people

I lived
I loved
I made something
I laughed
I cried

We’re exactly the same

Please do not forget me

I want to be free of you
I think of you
I smile
It hurts

Is love quantifiable?
Is it about plunging the world into darkness
Ripping the veil that separates us from heaven
And displaying the entirety of the cosmos
That exists for your express enjoyment?

Is love about grand gestures?
Draining the very seas
And telling you it cannot be measured
Endless like the grains of sand

Is love found in the quiet and still?
In the timid motions of a shy heart
Struggling to beat its pain away?

Not a burden
Not undeserving
Not broken,
A mess to be cleaned up.

So endlessly enough

It is the ancient, absent god, seldom spoken of in hushed whispers among certain literary circles.

Sustained by the fervent prayer of a single solemn supplicant.

Chapped palms raised with the melancholy and mettle of a man who has nothing left to lose.

When the sweet and sublime have passed, I still believe in love as though its existence would cease should I stop.

Treat my heart like your home
Decorate its walls
Invite your friends
Make it yours like I long for it to be

I can’t convert this pain into something positive.
I refuse to pass it on.  
I grasp at it doggedly,
Like a rock that drags me to the ocean floor.