you intensify a subtle creature inside me
with sudden nuances of sonorous blueness, aurora greenness,
naughty yellowness
with the impatience of roots piercing the earth of my soul
this creature keeps stumbling onto the same truth that
metabolizes light tenderly for me to have a measure of my depth
suddenly the strangest of strangers is I

Who would want to be a leader
In this world full of tricks
Where problems keep arising
Enough to make you sick

Who would want to be a leader
In a globe that slowly melts
Burned up from global warming
And the heat you’ll face if you fail

Who would want the power
That everyone knows corrupts
When everything you do
Will never be enough

Who would want to be the person
Everyone depends on
To make the hardest decisions
You must be stone strong

Who would want to be a leader
When you sacrifice yourself?
The most human part of you
Compassion, put on a shelf
To be forgotten.

Chained here
Watching someone build a palace
Of my broken pieces
And I’m screaming
Because they were mine
I’m being used
My tears for windows
My blood for paint
Every hammerstrike, I feel it
Every hole drilled in, I feel it
The holes in my pieces
Like your stare in my spine
I watch numbly
As you use up what was mine.

So much all the time
I give so much all the time
I just want it back.

I believe in destiny, not fate
Because our lives are steered
By the choices we make
Left or right, right or wrong
Our choices, not fate, make us strong
And yet, a certain destination
Is the best-case situation
Left or right, right or wrong
Or any path we walk along.

Hardship made the lines in her face deeper.
Cries echo as she stares bleakness in the face.
It is strength, but the kind of strength
That was worn down and beaten up.

She is the remains of a forest fire.

She is the mountain cliffside that still stands
Once the stones come crashing down.

There is no hope in the land where she lives.
There is, however, hope in her.

She must go on.

Again and always, she must go on.