"There is a clarity you feel...something like a bride would feel, removing a veil and seeing her husband without it. No thin mesh, clouding you. There is a clarity you feel when you finally put down your abuse."

I say while abusing once again. It's funny how light on dark moments makes the light seem brighter than normal. The truth is, the light is no different than any other day, but since you've never seen the light here its brighter. A funny perspective skew. With abuse it's the same way. You quit, give up the vice that holds you tighter than any human hand. And feels more comfortable than love. You quit addiction for sun light because after you've given death a few rounds you realize that sun isn't just bright...it's warm.

It touches your skin
and all your cells race
to the surface,
antioxidize my sins.

Months pass and you become used to the light. It's normal again, and it grows weary under the weight of the boots. The veil would be better than this.

It was better than this.

And so the light becomes the same, and maybe you need darkness again to feel that warmth. Maybe you need the vice to cut off your circulation, make you shiver in the summer winter. So that sunlight doesn't just slide past you, so that it touches you again, the way it did when you opened your eyes for the first time...

Guilt rides your
back instead,
the warhorse
of an individual
apocalypse.

You make it, though...you keep secrets, you tell lies, so no one knows. It's not just darkness, it's silence, to deprivate from

"You can get through this"
"You'll be okay"
"Youre strong"

Because paranoid whispers are better friends. But it takes awakening from the right dream to remember that the sun loves you more. Your sun loves everyone, it pours down on everyone, it fills the darkness. All the darkness is just empty space anyway. Waiting for something warm to fill it.

It takes awakening from the right dream to make you realize that the sun doesn't just fill darkness, it grows life, it lives at the crest of mountain peaks, above the ocean of clouds.

So you understand that sun lights a path,
and you run it,
you plant feet
and
oaks blossom.

You never again take the world for granted.
You never again compare light.
Because even if it is the same light overflowing a new dark,
It is a growing light.

And it is always warm,
And it sometimes burns.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I am lying perfectly still
But the ripples of my heart beat
Lap softly against the small head
Of my daughter
Nestled under my arm
Fast asleep.