I hope my thoughts fill my journal’s paper as effortlessly as an artist’s paint strokes fills their canvas.
As if their expression of the heart was just muscle memory.
I want my words to fill the edges of my paper because they have taken all my head space.
Scribbling the words off the edges of the paper to be etched in the desk & forever out of my memory.
I wish the words may begin to fill the gaps of my emotions.
& I keep writing my own story over and over and over again.
In hopes that if I write it enough times the end will arrive differently.
Cause the years taught me that life can make you bitter as the grapes that fill your inner vine.
& Unlike wine I have learned people don’t always get better with time.
So, I write, and write, and write until all my grief becomes blessing.

To each of I, that is not myself.
Scrambling a puzzle with no picture.
Colliding letters but fumbling only sounds.
Falling deaf to the noise.
A prism that light can shine through, but never into.

I feel inspired.
Inspired to write about the man in line who I do not know, but I do know.
Friends, strangers, & self.
So well acquainted as a seamless stich.
I smile.
Hand touches arm.
The endearing laugh of an unfamiliar sound, but I hear you so well.
Faces around turned and gauged in.
Gravitation pull, loneliness lost in the open.
Closed by the proximity of our spaces colliding.  
Today, a stranger saved me at the sound of hello.

A questionnaire of my family history is only a monologue I tell myself.
Practicing in front of the mirror to get better.
So, the next time the doctor’s words I am sorry falls back into their lips.
& I am onto my feet.
A vapid, monologue screenplay.
The rehearsed version of my life.
Answering the questions.
Somehow still fumbling through the words.
Yet leaving voids in my answers as my family’s members absence did.
Mother?
Two strokes. She’s alive but not apparent enough to know it.
Her blood runs too thick.
Blood pressure always boiling.
Mother knew how to live fast but never well enough.
Father?
Dead. He was alive but never long enough to hold it.
Heart always dropping and head into the palms of his hands.
Thirst never stopping.
Alcoholism is a wicked thing I say.
Siblings?
Brother. Alive somehow not present enough to count it.
Healthy. We count his days as tick-tack-toe though.
Family history has a lineage that says the roots in this family tree are rotten.
Sister. Victim to mental health.
The prodigy of a broken foster system.
I reckon her days are counted in lines.
Between days she’s alive & the days she wishes she wasn’t.
The doctor does an homage in the way she bows her head.
Makes the hollowed-out chest of mine seem like it’s filled with water.
I let out a gasp.
Trying to fill the room where all the air has seemed to have evaporated.
Hoping to catch my breath.
My story filling their break room like a lingering coffee smell.
Keeping them brewed in satisfaction that it could always be worse.
My story always seemed like the punch line for better days.
Our family has been waiting since genesis for such.
These are the days I wish I believed in something.
A god to drown every nightfall with dawn.

She was beautiful.
The moment I was graced with her presence the air became a warm, calming breeze. It took me over in the way an ocean wave would.  I’d been with her for five minutes before I wanted to undress her. Not in the way which her black lace dripped over her shoulder exposing her sun kissed skin. I wanted to undress her in the way which she was naked and exposed in the light of her own essence. I desired to know what dark day allowed her eyes to read such solemnness. I clung to know of the day that gave light to the darkness & allowed her eyes to twinkle of the stars.
She read books in the dim light corner of her faux leather chair surrounded by plants. Gleaming to the light as if she was the only reflection of its pure form. I’d been admiring her from the across the room as she grazed up the pages of her latest novel.
She always looked to have known something more than that was ever said. I swear, there was a whisper through the crack of her bay window. The wind breathing secrets to her instead of air.
The way she smirked led you to know that she knew of something you never would. I’d never have known what love was but looking at her in that moment I thought I just might.

I am starting to see the cracks in I.
The voice that I could not differentiate from.
The part of me I mistakenly identified as I.
Whispers its grievances like ghost rolling upon 3am.
As if my mind is its corridor to haunt.
Oh, no longer I, the one that associates itself with me.
The ego is the one who pronounces I.
Hangs off your existence like Corporate America preys on the poor.
The part of you and I that questions am.
The one voice that separates us.
Same as the fake border that pronounces mine, yours, and theirs.
Ownership that never fails to remind you.
It’s the voice that degrades you.
Same as the men who teach boys that boundaries only exist for state lines.
It’s the part of I, that am bears in the burdening of pretending…
Pretending that the notion that you must be this or you must be that.
The promises we keep to I instead of am.
These are the same silent alliances our egos share.
Parts of us that accepts submissively.
That trades profit for war.
That values trees as paper.
That mistakes water as a product not a right.
That part of I that tells you that the land belongs to I…
But you see, you are not I, you are not the ego.
The part of am reminds you that reminds that you –
That you belong to the land, but the land does not belong to you…

I AM