And just like that
my heart is racing,
with things I don't yet know
people I have yet to meet
and places I long to visit.

He’s broken promises and lifetime regrets.
He might not win daddy of the year,
he spends his evenings and early mornings wishing he could’ve been a better father.  He’s not a role model,
he made mistakes.
He smoked the things he couldn’t,
he forgot the things he shouldn’t.
He’s so much more.
A leader
an army of youth at his side,
spiting fire that he lit the flame to.
He opened the doors to our poetry,
letting us become the people who we are and what we want.
I never liked having my work judged continuously, until I met him.
His judgement is not for life or death
, it’s for the words I could never speak unless I wrote them.
  A friend,
with the best advice,
a man with a past is a man with experience.
  He can tell you all about late, hazy nights in smoke-filled hotel rooms and polite crack heads in Portland, Maine.
  A man,
willing to address his mistakes and send them flying back to their rightful place,
the past.
He’s the toughest man I know and the only father-figure I like to look up to.
He is.
A role model.
Because,
contrary to popular understanding, a past of mistakes leads to a future of knowledge.
  If I become half the man he is,
I’ll know I’ve lived my life as a good man.
  I can see passion in every word as a slightly under-confident man shoots bullets with poetic lines that can make a room,
pretty **** quiet.
Most doesn’t see him like I do.
  They see tattoos and “*******’s” and assume he a part of the lost youth.  
They’ll never know he’s the compass leading us out of the cave of darkness.
I see a man who smokes too much because he cares for every poet who steps to a mic.
  I see broken promises and lifetime regrets.
He’s all of those things but,
in reality.
He’s.
So.
Much.
More.

It's early enough
things are starting to lighten up
you know that brief in-between time
when the sky is that strange,
infinitely deep blue?
And you feel honored to catch
that fleeting moment
before the slide flips
and the sun climbs
and the blue seeps away?

My family is a bunch of animals.
My mother is a lioness,
strong, brave, and full of pride,
with claws sharp as knives,
for anyone that harms her cub she will strike.
my father is a hyena,
foolish, never serious, and a lazy scavenger,
that doesn't do anything but eat the crap that he creates.
My grand parents are elephants,
big and strong during the day,
blind and helpless during the night.
My aunts and uncles are the herd of gazelles,
they graze when they can,
but when the lioness comes they silence and run away with fear.
My dogs are the shade that comforts me from the burning sun of life.
The day has come when the lioness shall not roam the tall grasses of the Serengeti.
Without the lioness the gazelles are persistently grazing,
depleting the grass,
grazing and depleting until there was no grass left for me to hide in,
they rammed and bucked at me like I had no right to grieve.
I was a helpless cub on that day and I still am,
wondering when the lioness will show up to be my heroine again.
But as the gazelles buck and ram,
a kangaroo and a zebra rush in,
embrace me,
and take me in,
I now have a second family with:
a savage tiger,
Italian chipmunks,
boxing kangaroos,
kick-*** monkeys,
elderly turtles,
burly bears,
religious zebras,
and untimely rabbits.
My second family is diverse,
but they never do the worst just as my first.
This is a story that I usually don't tell,
but this my past life so I must tell, tell, tell...
This is what God raised me to be,
This for me and only me.
One day the light will show for me,
and me and the lioness will forever again be free,
to roam the plains in the skies above,
just like a dove.