i am every unfinished poem that sits in piles of crumpled paper by your waste bin and every crowded thought in the cranial space above your neck. i am every word that begs to be free from the tip of your tongue but remains just out of your memory's reach. i am comprised of the colors of sunrise but am more the mood of a sunset. i am the familiar  fingerprints on your favorite coffee mug. i am a wicker rocking chair on somebody's grandmother's porch. i am bite marks on your pencil and the crick in your neck. i am the vacant blurry buzz of an old television set. i am all of the places i have never been. i am lovers' names carved into summertime tree bark, promising "forever" - only to fall short of that promise by the time the leaves change. i am here. i am not where i belong.

you are the gravity that keeps my feet on earth. you are the atmosphere i breathe. you are the rain that feeds my soul & makes flowers grow. you are my revival and my revolution and the courage i kept hidden inside of closed fists for so long i formed crescent moons in my palms. you are an unstoppable fire that is burning me alive in the best way. you are the only rooftop i have ever visited that i haven't felt the urge to jump off of. you are the gentle hum and rumble of the washing machine i used to nap beside when i was a little girl. you are the creaky wooden swing in my backyard where i sat for countless hours and smoked and cried and pondered. you are all my favorite odds & ends bound together by my wildest dreams. you are sometimes so beyond my understanding, that i wonder when i'm going to wake up; and if i ever did find out that you were just a dream, i would bang on heaven's gates and plead with god to let me sleep. you are there. i am here, you are there.

one of us needs to move.

- m.f.

They say that humans are compassionate and loving creatures, with a wide variety of emotions. Yet they also say humans are the most feared and horrible creatures on this planet. And all of these things were yet said by humans. What most people don’t say or tend to notice is that humans are full of oxymorons, hypocrisys, and failure. That may sound negative but it isn’t. If humans weren’t flawed then we wouldn’t be humans right? I believe those two most common perceptions of humans come from the two most commonly perceived personality types present in humans. You have the super happy-go-lucky type who believes the world is perfect and pure and no one wants to hurt each other. And then you have the extremely hateful cynical type. The people who have been hurt and stepped on and abused and feel they have every right to hate the world. But I think these two extremes are quite unfair to the majority of the population that is in the middle grey area. The reality is that the world is a mystery and treats every human differently with different experiences, just as all humans are different from each other. It’s quite beautiful, that grey area. You never really know what’s going to happen in the middle and its exciting.

I'm frightened when the phone rings for the very first time,
And every ring after that makes me just as nervous
And angry
As if I want to yell for silence
But no one is there

There's one good thing about the house phone ringing,
If they leave a voicemail, they get to hear my dad's voice
I haven't heard my dad speak in fifty days
He was fifty when he died,
fifty days ago
fifty doesn't seem so old to me now

There are nights that I get to see him,
But only with my eyes closed
While I sleep on his pillow
Because it still smells like him
Sometimes I hear his voice
And my stomach drops and I grin
Until I realize...

I'm frightened
And every ring after that makes me just as nervous
And angry
As if I want to yell at someone
But no one is there

There's one good thing about depression,
After you leave a voicemail on your mother's phone, you'll be put to sleep
In fifty different ways,
with fifty different pills
because fifty doesn't seem like so many to me now

Fifty just doesn't feel like anything to me now
I just don't feel anything now

I remember once in church,
when i used to go,
before i lost my faith,
a quote, one that has stuck with me all these years,

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

it was a quote which gave me strength,
and hope,
hope in the fact that i was not alone in the face of danger,
in the face of loss and death,

but the funny thing is,
hope is a lie,
as it that quote,
when we walk in the valley of death in the shadow of pain,
we are alone no one stands with us,
no one give us strength or courage,

these are forged by us,
courage,
hope,
strength,
we must build these,
we must create these to survive,

because the valley of death is a harsh place,
a place where one wrong step,
can lead you to your hearts fears,
and your souls pain,

because when,
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
we walk alone and must forge our own path.

I felt my world unfolding
So confused
What was true?
What was right?
It was like a tsunami
Ripped through my life
I was drowning from the destruction
I found the way to save myself
I found the rock, the branch, to cling onto
To pull myself away
From the Ghost of the relationship
From the debris of
Pain
Poetry – I will not let go
My freedom to write about
The life that nearly ended mine
Beyond Sunset and Sunrise this
Is a fight I will never give up?

Maybe this isolation isn't what I need, all this silence letting my thoughts run like a faucet
My thoughts always lead me to situations I could never imagine, they completely take control of me as if I was some toy robot and my mind is the control
Perhaps I've just lost my sanity, or maybe my mind just stole it from me like a thief
I can sit here all I want, my body nearly infusing itself into this warm bed of mine, and tell myself things can get better, that maybe I can actually do something with my life but I just have no motivation and sometimes it feels as if perhaps my mind stole that as well
But as if I know at this point, all I can do is just sit here and wait
and that's what I do
I guess all I need is some patience