Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t just been the backseat of your car,
Intoxicated. My first drunk hook up. My first. Period.
I picture myself being champagne on Valentine’s Day.
I picture myself being you, nervous in the car, holding Starbucks
because you know I love coffee. Sometimes, I picture myself as her,
calling you a stalker and ignoring your calls,
but then I see myself. I call you beautiful,
turn you into poetry, laugh at your bad jokes,
I see myself as I become your drunk Wednesday night
when you’re sad. I see myself as I say no,
I become a “this is not a good idea”
and you a “we’ll deal with the consequences in the morning.”
We laugh because this hurts too much.
You take her out for dinner and I burrow money
for Plan B because you forgot you don’t like condoms
and clearly have no idea how children are made.
I have already named him. He has your curls and
my anxiety. He is smart. Except, I never wanted kids and
you would be a great father. Instead, you tell her
the beach reminds you of her and I cry in a McDonald’s
bathroom with my friend as relief floods through me that
the test comes negative. I stop talking to you,
move forward, meet someone new and before long
see myself becoming you. Because isn’t that the cycle?
Bad men turn good women into bad women who turn
good men into bad men. I’ll set him free so he can hurt
someone like me, and I drink red wine as I read her
poems about him and me.

What does it mean to be human?
Forged in the hearts of the universe
A billion fragments of creation, woven into one existence
Children of the stars that envious eyes reflect
What does it mean to be human?
I am the universe
I am alone

What does it mean to find beauty?
To witness the Sun's racing photons pierce the atmosphere
with bursting lust for the horizon
The waves finding my eyes, and leaking dopamine in my brain
What does it mean to find beauty?
I am in awe
I am chemistry

What does it mean to write poetry?
To order the shapes and symbols written by dead men
in a way no one has ever seen before
A fool's attempt to have one feel what all have felt before
What does it mean to write poetry?
I am a poet
I am a liar

What does it mean to die?
To find the book continues writing
for you were not the protagonist all along
To learn this, only once you cannot learn at all
What does it mean to die?
I am alive
I am finite

What does it mean to love?
To see the finite chemicals in all the lonely liars
And to hold them close
In awe of the universal poetry that is our lives
All the same, we are all the same
I am love
If we were anything else, there would be no point
No Hope
No Life

It's melancholy, you know
Crying until dawn
Your mind seeks for answers
Everything is just wrong,
But your heart whispers hold on

I'm tired, you know
Of keeping up this act
Of smiling when I want to cry
Of being everyone's heroine
But when it's my turn to fall apart
All those I have rescued
Are nowhere to be found

My heart
Is becoming
Like a forest
Dense and thick with pines
The deeper I go
The more lost I become

I scream HELP ME
But I'm in a dream
And no one can hear me
No one can see me.

My mind is finally clearing
Like rays of sunlight
Breaking through heavy storm clouds
And something rose up in my Spirit,
It said:
"Everything will be alright"
I had a vision of myself
Smiling from cheek to cheek
And I just knew,
Everything would be more than okay
Because today, something has changed
And now I am happy.

We were meant to be shooting stars
Hurtling through space
We were created for big things,
For grand purposes,
And to share love

But age has a way
Of turning our hopeful hearts
Into cold and calculating cynics
With so many walls up,
We make it so hard
for people to love us

We protect our hearts
With a maze of thorny vines
And then we cry
Wondering why
Nobody truly loves
the soft and delicate infant
Hiding behind our eyes

You've got to go out on a limb,
Find the last bits of courage in your soul
And with that courage
You need to be fiercely authentic
On purpose
Within every moment

You must love so much
That you become love
Love yourself,
Love others,
And love God
Trade in your walls for boundaries
Don't allow people
Who don't know how to love
Hurt you

This process will take more time than you
Understand now
But just think of it like this:
You can't rush a pregnancy,
You can't rush a caterpillar's metamorphosis into a butterfly,
You can't rush an acorn to grow into an oak tree
You have to wait
For your soul to grow
Give it what it most needs through
This period of gestation,
The nutrients of the Soul:
Love,
Understanding,
Hope,
Joy,
Peace,
And whatever else
Your Soul calls for

Then one day,
You'll be walking down a busy sidewalk
And you'll catch a glimpse of yourself
In a storefront window
You'll do a double take
And notice that you couldn't recognize yourself
Initially because
Your face is softer now,
Kinder,
Happy

This journey
Of becoming
Who you were meant to be
Will continue on
For your entire lifetime
It's really more like
You are re-becoming
The person you were born into this world as:
Innocent, pure, and loving

God has a blueprint for each of our lives
But what happens to most of us
Is that this world
Causes us to become disconnected
To ourselves
And we lose ourselves
In trivial pursuits and ego desires
But you can find your way back home
To your heart
And rediscover
Who you were truly meant to be.

So forth went the cardinal,
who from her tree perch had wondered
why her colors were of the earth
and not the magnificent sunset.

Others around her had bore
the brilliant crimson, yet she’d remained
as she had always been:
dull as the branches of home.

Thus went the cardinal,
who in the limitless sky soon discovered:
the music that beckoned her forward
was eternally blind.