A women boarded the same subway stop as me today.
She wore a white, flowing shawl with tiny purple flowers on it
that stretched down to her knees.
She reminded me of my childhood and of my mother in her thirties.
She held a grocery bag with daffodils in it,
and I felt she was something rather special.

Perhaps we had been joined in each other's lives
for these fifteen minutes,
for some strange reason,
much unbeknownst to the two of us.
I tried to figure it out,
but ran out of time,
and as we emerged from the station,
she walked north,
and I went east.
Maybe I'll never know.
Maybe she was just a woman
with a white shawl and purple flowers.

My stomach drops
when the car goes down a hill.
I feel like I'm falling,
but not in a bad way.
Like a sort of drug,
or midnight shot of tequila.
Warmth floods
my body.
Everything's okay.
If you hurt yourself first,
others don't get the chance.

All I can give you
is my empty heart,
my hollow love.
Like a glove,
it wears thin with time.

Beautifully broken,
barely belonging.

Eyes open, awake in exhaustion.
Bones ache, can't catch a wink.
Pretty love songs
sing my worries away.
Still my teeth grind,
grind, grind.

It's late.
The cars have stopped honking,
but the wheels of my mind turn on and
on and on.

I walked through a burning house
and found I was alone -
all the others had fled,
yet forgotten to warn me.

The mirror is the only one who speaks to me now.
It tells me of my beauty,
and bemoans my fleeting youth.
It curses the briefness of my body,
and of my supple bones and bare *******.

I envy the trees and the butterflies,
who found their beauty too acute to share with me.
I envy the lakes and rivers,
whose beauty will only grow with time.

As I wilt and fade in color,
the world shall grow ever fairer, ever nobler.

Such is life,
and such is time.

That first inhale
is like every small joy
wrapped into one neat package,
assembled in a nice, red box
meant just for you.

Flick, flick,
go the ashes,
the end burning brightly
like a firefly on a dim Southern night.

When my lighter blazes
beneath the light drizzle of tonight,
I'm reminded that life
can be so delightfully decadent,
so enchantingly effervescent.

The good times
are made all the sweeter
And the bad times -
the car trouble,
the failures,
and the lost hopes -
lose their edge,
and take on a shape as soft as smoke,
subject to float away with time,
leaving only a sharp smell behind.

You kiss like it's going out of style.
You kiss like you're already inside me.
Heavy breaths, panting,
arms and legs tingling.
No need for words
with kisses like those.

Those kisses are poetry itself.

People are like flowers.

We begin as sprouts,
so susceptible to harm
that even a vague breeze
may blow us out.
The only way to grow
is through the careful nurturing
of another.
Under proper care,
and in the right environment,
we bloom,
each of us a little differently.
We exude beauty
and absorb pain.
We feed off of both the sunlight
and the rain.

Like flowers,
we are so very alive -
creatures of the Earth,
and so exquisitely designed to be just so.