You are not condemned
To the confines of life
Nor the sounds of being locked in
And hit by dirt
You do not belong
To the flowers they send
The wishes they write
Or the tree they plant in your name
You are not prisoner
To a shallow grave
And a shallower gravestone
Not even to the duties you left behind
You have not been claimed
By the years you will not see
The tears you cannot dry
Or the hugs you cannot return
You are not captive
To the sounds and words
That defined you
Or the way people shaped you
Because you are free from condemnation
From the clutch of sickness
Free to leave and wipe the tears
And hug the ones that hesitate
To throw the dirt over the years
You are free from prison,
From proclamation,
From captivity and condemnation
To help and to inspire
And to free others from a prison
Of grief.

The air is crisp.
Crisp, that is the word my dad used to describe Gwen's voice after the No Doubt concert. I was eight then.

Crisp, the word I thought of, when I was flicking that brown lighter I thought it would be funny to buy, sitting on the stoop. Striking the wheel, careful not to hit the little red button. The air swept against the sunglasses I paid too much for with the lenses that are mismatched and the sweater my mom bought me two christmases ago that originally I hated.

Falling leaves drift by those little windows to my soul but I am too distracted by the thought of him coming to pick me up to try to attach them back to the tree. Too bad too, because with every leaf detached, comes winter further on my face.

Thats when the crystals fall from my dreams, and cover the once adobe hills in spells of skyscrapers. Those are the guys who form tools out of my can of hairspray and chip at the ozone trying to scrape off the blue, and see what all that paint is covering. Icarus is horrified.

It's scary,
It's terrifying,
How your love is meant to cure but instead I become *weary,
Your words are hate defying.

I'm waiting,
I'm impatient.
You're leaving one day, that goes without saying.
Don't mean to hurt you, I'm just being blatant.

It's sad,
It's dreadful,
How you try so hard to please me as I'm waving a red flag.
I'm pushing, you keep pulling- soon you'll be regretful.

I'm weak,
I'm needy.
Be strong for the both of us as I **** the strength out of you with every word I speak.
I beg you to stay as I push you out, hardheartedly.

You're striving,
You're standing tall.*
Telling me to believe in us whilst we're *thriving.
But I'm fragile, powerless- we're beginning to fall and *there's nothing you can say or do at all.

Don't want to speak too soon
   or speak too late, for that matter

Should speak up and speak out
   ...cat got your tongue?

But not speak ill or speak out of turn
   ...bite your tongue!

Above all, speak the truth, your truth
   ...not with a forked tongue

Truth be told
   sometimes I don't want to speak at all
And if you knew me
   that would truly be saying something

Speak!...Speak!...Good boy...

Slumbered scratching into a bedside notebook
   lying in darkness under a thick blanket of revelation
Afraid that lamplight may blind these 3am eyes
   to the dim, wispy glow of mystical comprehension

Trusting that valued mysteries will later be deciphered
   from this barely legible scrawl of the night
Refusing to squander such moments of divine lucidity
   captured in a poetic hand written outside the lines

Reluctant to wait until morning lest the light of day
   exposes a tenuous relationship to reality
Causing rays of enlightenment to glance off its surface
   in beams of obscure and superficial logic

Tangential truths
   scribbled in the dark