It never felt quite right...
Yet never really wrong
Pretending you're alright,
When you know you don't belong

All at once the Demon
Masquerading as a God
Perfectly imperfect
Magnificently flawed

The quiet desperation
Sweet silent isolation
Now all that I can feel...my own violent soul's vibration
That sordid celebration
That terrible temptation
The shattering of tender hearts...My downfall's orchestration

The final walk through paradise
The waterfall of tears
The bastion of loneliness
The sum of all our fears

The tiger crouched behind you
The bomb that's ticking down
The iron ball inside your throat
You choke on as you drown

The dusty corpse of yesterday
Crumbling to a pile
I think I'll sit here all alone
Just breathing for a while

I hope you have a daughter
Just as beautiful as you
I hope she is an angel
And she makes your dreams comes true

I hope she falls in love one day
I hope their love is real
I hope she drives him mad with love
The way you made me feel

I hope she loves her culture
I hope she loves her God
I hope he doesn't fit the mold
The same way I was flawed

I hope she doesn't hide from you
And that you've helped her understand
True love transcends both faith and race
And it sure as hell's not planned

I hope you get to meet him
And see how he makes her smile
I hope that if she tells him yes
He can walk her down the aisle

The hardest thing I've ever done
Was giving you my heart
And being crushed as ignorance
Tore our love apart

It's one of the most enlightening paradoxes I've become aware of:
That often the stories which seem the saddest or most heart-breaking are the most beautiful

The beauty is usually not in the circumstances themselves...but in how we respond to those circumstances with courage, strength, hope, resilience, and above all love...

It changes everything...
To acknowledge that such beauty can be born of the deepest darkness

Darkness that is able to crush despite having no tangible mass or substance
Darkness that consumes us if we forget that we are the light...

Light by its very definition is energy...maybe that explains why it can be so hard to battle darkness...it can be exhausting
Yet, as long as we can perceive the darkness...we can also manifest the light that is our salvation
That is Beautiful...

To come to the realization that we are not condemned to be prisoners in the darkness until some outside entity bestows light upon us
At any moment, we have but to shift our perception inward and we find that which we seek

This is not to say that outside entities cannot help us to find this light...
But merely to reveal that the light which we seek is not withheld from us by any force outside of our control

This also does not mean darkness is ever eliminated, for without light darkness always returns...ever assuring us of its presence.

This means we must consciously and constantly strive to find within us our own light...
This is our journey...a journey in which each of us may arrive at the destination along vastly different paths using strategies as unique as our identities themselves
Although others may aid us on this journey, providing strength and encouragement, they cannot walk our paths for us...

Thus we must develop strategies...
Darkness can be so deep that we lose sight of our sources of light
This is where mindfulness is required
We must practice gratitude...not on occaision, but we must condition ourselves to be grateful even when surrounded by darkness
Even in darkness we can be grateful, and by practicing gratitude we arouse our inner light
Love is born from gratitude...we cannot have one without the other
And love is as pure an energy as the light from the sun itself
As the sun produces light, so too can we generate love through practicing gratitude
And with this love we may begin to realize that the light we seek comes not from without...but from within

And that is Beautiful

The pain it burns
as hot as stars
Though we've healed
we hate our scars

The shame we feel
the dark regret
The ones we hurt
we can't forget

Hidden terrors
we relive
It's ourselves
we can't forgive

When monsters speak
for us instead
Most words are better
left unsaid

Although we're told
that life goes on
and night is darkest
before dawn

Still we hate
what we've become
alone and lost
cold and numb

It's waking up
without a name
It's wondering
who we became

The fall from grace
it's not so bad
it's this new place
that drives us mad