Where I come from isn't all that great
My education was a piece of crap
My morals are a little whacked
And my friends are just as screwey as me
We didn't eat fancy foods
Happiness was out of reach
We weren't going anywhere
Had no money in our pockets
Still we knew
Someday we'd make it big
Rise above it all
Like the stars did
But that godforsaken town
Swallowed so many lives
Now Dom's doing 25 to life
Catie had a baby
And Justin lost to his own knife
The cops know our names by heart
Cause we spend more time in jail then home
And mothers hide their children
When we walk down the street
Cause we are the kids
Raised on broken dreams

In the absence of your essence I still find your spirit hovering in the mist of the day, and the darkness that follows...
Even though you scurry in the shadows of hatred I still see your heart yearning to love
As long as a single spark remains, the fire can always be restarted
As long as there is hope I'll never despair
As long as it takes, is as long as I will wait
Until you learn to love again, to finish what we had only just began, to write our story without a pen, to write the truth as it is.

after Catie Rosemurgy

Seeing, excitement, no-wake lakes.
The category of photographs that survived a move, all of which
have curled in the hot, short summers.

Sugar maples and their forgotten limbs that stray
into the misty morning road. The father holding back
his tears with oil-stained knuckles.

Spice cabinets. Spiders. The intense
empathy found only in the kind.
Every smile remembered.