If I could lay
                       my tired head
       onto your shaky chest every evening
Maybe then I'd stop missing
             that heartbeat of yours
                                And it's sweet
       lullaby.

How does a mother explain to a daughter
That the father she has loved-
The man who took the young girl in his arms to teach her how to dance in the musty attic, the father who sang her to sleep when the nightmares turned to terrors, the dad who taught her that laughter is the cure to everything;
How does a mother tell her daughter he chose a drink over his princess?
A gulp of liquid death whose fire burned
Not only down the throat,
But in the lives of the prisoner who that devil caught.
How did she tell her?
No words.
No mention of why daddy had fallen in that attic,
No saying that he'll come back.
No one ever told me that the reason I wake up screaming is from the dreams that can't be quieted without him. No mother told me that the wonderful man I remember, full of love and life had been drowning in his own choices. No it was left to a journal found way deep in a box for a young girl to come find.
And now the fire is not pouring down a throat,
Nor in the attic of that once life-full home.
That fire is in his little girl, who forgot how to dance and whose dreams still haunt her, the one who forgot what it means to laugh.

I met a traveller, from the only land she had ever known,
she was a spring of joy to me with many far away steps along her path.
With such old eyes, that set like stone, so afraid of her own wrath.

Such a beautiful daisy in a field of burnt grass,
yet her stone eyes were fixed on the dead,
devoid of her own beauty, without glass.
Oh darling, there is light ahead.

I was the charred grass around her,
yet our meeting was so delayed.
till the thunder rolled and rain slashed did she stir,
and the traveller need not be afraid.

The forgotten grass soon turned to clean dirt,
oh my sister, I wont let you hurt.

As a child I heard the stories of monsters under my bed
of
bumps, in the night.
When did these stories turn into reality?
When now I realize the monster was not beneath my bed
coaxing me into his claws;
but in my mind
perpetually switching the light off
and closing the door to the ones trying to set me free.
When did this monster
become me?

Every night
                          [darkness so overwhelming]
trying so hard to sleep
                          [silence so deafening]
to push the last day out of mind
                          [loneliness so persistant]
Attempting strength
                          [weak for so long]
till I found strength in his eyes.