That night we wept open
Love poured from my eyes
You held my heart flooding
Even you cried
I let love hang like honey
Sweet and so pure

The next day was different
You loved me at my worst
Triggered and tangled
You held on so tight
I fought and was frightened
So scared to be right

That day I wept open
Love poured from my eyes
You held my heart flooding
Even I cried
I let love hang like honey
So sweet and so pure
Stuck in you love
Safe and secure

Love is a weighty thing
Soft sometimes
Always sharp enough to keep you bleeding
I always felt the harder you loved
The farther the fall
The kind of fall that kills you
I started imagining the impact before feeling it's warmth
I would negotiate with myself
"A punch to the face would ease the lonely"
I had been choked out by the hands that held me
To be touched was not breathing
Love is a fist fight inside me
Is wreckless abandon
Love is a weakness
Always being exploited
A knife fight
And I have nothing left to be taken
Love is a weapon
Love is a word
An empty feeling left unheard
Love is a knife fight
A weighty thing.
Don't ask me to love you,
I could never
I care for you to much

Some days I am hideously alive

Decomposing memories

Deeply trenched in manipulation

****** noses and broken hearted…

dark circles and scabbed over

clotting and bruised

Festered wound pushing out poison.

Some days I am defective, calloused and weak

Some days I am gnawing and farel

Less human and more lizard

Puckered scars and blistered skin

Healing isn't always pretty

Some wounds get infected

Bones have to be reset…

Abscesses drained

I survived…

But I don't have the same skin

You wouldn't recognize me

I'm breathing

Some days that hurts

I know how old love turns to torture
how your burnt lungs fill with water
how rib cage restricts heartbeat
how mean you move away

I push through old scars and burning houses
Try and make something from ruble, ashes
soot-stained skin and smeared mascara
ocean pouring from my eyes
and endless void makes me cry

you run from me
I am drowning
I try to hold on to you
I
Can't
Breathe
why
don't
you
just
leave.
If you sit here so empty anyway
just dying to be somewhere else
each moment killing me
all I want is for you
to love me as you use too.

I take up space because I am valuable.
I say that as I eat and rejoice in my outward growth
Delighted in food as it hits my mouth, and how it hugs my body.
I say that as I stretch out on the bus
Tacking no less room then the man spread that is so recklessly unaware of itself.
I say that as I raise my voice refusing silencers
His voice will not penetrate an overwhelming truth, no matter how loud he speaks over me
I say that as I stand tall, combating the overlooker
I sway surly and head held high as I am worthy
As I celebrate my *******
Praise the blood that shows my strengths
I cast away the thought that a bleeding thing is weak
Is it not true that he has been known to bleed too?
I take up space because I am valuable
Treasured for my thoughts and wholeness
I say that as I work out, muscles showing
My strength oblivious to the male ego, without fear of being any less of a woman
I say that as I challenge myself and others
Because meekness was something I was taught, not something that I am.
I say that as I refuse to be consumed
I am not a product for pleasure I am a human, a consciousness with feeling.
I say that as I really am, as a goddess, a queen, an equal
An individual with agency and determination
As I celebrate my character
Praise the misguided for building me up
Refuting the idea that blood is shameful
Because my womanhood is in part my pride
I say that I am valuable very simply,
because I am

If I could build a future out of yesterdays hope
I would have a charming home
A quaint oasis that I built from our old love

I would have manifested our children
From stardust and cat-like curiosity
Their chubby toes would point them in the right direction always

If I could architect a future out of empty promises
I would have more than a deflated reality
An image of a home whos outline wavers
Ella’s name would not be make-believe
Her laughter would have filled my hallways
Her eyes would be known and her whole self-cherished

If it were possible to make out of what was taken
I would make my gate from recycled doors
That way I could have privacy
While always remembering how to let others in
how to stay open

I would show you how to blow air into a balloon, we would watch it fill up
So you could see that even dreams need something tangible to breathe life into them

I wish I could create with the disappointment you filled my life with
It is so abundant, it would be so practical it is littered throughout my memory
So much of what I am left with I can’t use to build, its *******
I cashed in five years just to realized you were a bad investment

If I could build from your lies a home
I would spread my capacity for caring softly across the surface of each room, like wallpaper
I would remove the hand-painted sign that read
"My home is where you are"
Because I have proven you are not the essentials needed
to make a house a home, I am.

Once I was told the universe was nothing and then it became something
Maybe this void that holds the space inside of me
Where my future plans and dreams dissolved
Where a skeleton of my almost family and life died
where the plot to build the home that will never be resides
Maybe that’s where my big bang can start

I need to make something bigger than the life I planned with you
Ill turn this nothing into something
Just watch me breathe life into my new beginnings
see my new home I build when the bricks are not soft-spoken manipulations of the truth
but are real bricks that bear weight and hold things up
A real home

She spoke fast and furious
over time she saw he never heard it
She folded away all her curious
slowly tucking them into his jeans pockets
button up shirts crisp and ironed
her warmth does not come from the dryer
tears welling up inside her

if God really did exist
then why did he make her like this?
destined only to please men
They both say her existence
no matter her repentance
could ever free her from this curse
a second class citizen from the moment of her birth
a second class sins again
as she dreams of life outside of
pleasing him
she sins again
when she stops fitting in
she sins again
Shes resenting them
For the fire over feminine
she thinks at least I am not one of them
the closet she has come
To loving what she was