A heart is a flame that needs some kindling
to fuel it's energies past the limits of self fueling.
It yearns for the uniting of another kind soul
to fuel a beautiful light...such only asking
for a separate heart's  true gifts
of the soul in  heart
to start giving
beaming from the fires that warm souls and ignite hearts.
to flames of passion
Such must be fed with such foods of interests of loving for the soul, in a beneficial fashion
melting one another and fusing two into one huge soul that is a mystic form of energy..
Two souls fitting like pieces meant for the same puzzle
It defines the role of true fortune and Beauty
Souls that are powerful fuels for one another
feed and maintain the lights and which such  shines to the world from one another
to the dark world and souls around the two
as their become a "solar Sun" created from nuclear bonds
Fission-ed  from each other's loving atoms
Signals the birth of a newer galaxy of the like with those united by the pair's united light
Such miracles are seldom and few.
Given the nurturing, care, and expressed need to learn, grow, and become a two piece set that builds one larger entity
Such blasts the brightness from this sun's rays of warmth and flames to other's in need of warmth and light
to fill their worlds with a miracle
as a gift
from their hearts for all eternity.

“Take my hand.”

Take my lips, my clothes, my body; take all the confidence we got off on
dancing across the kerosene-doused floor in the heat of each other’s skin,
slowly learning what it truly meant to love and to have someone to love,
as the flames of romance consumed us faster than we could consume each other.

Take this unusually large water bottle and this board game you’ve always wanted
as if our brutal game of trial and error wasn’t painful enough,
immaturity dripping from eager eyes, and expiration dates on gift receipts,
when I should have been giving you all the things fire cannot burn.

So here, allow me try again:

Take my words.

Take every grain of honesty I’m on my knees picking up one by one
after carelessly falling from the train of thought making its way to you,
spending all those years helplessly lost in translation under rusty railways
because our tongues were only fluent in the language of each other’s touch.

Take the vulnerability my mother always warned me not to wear on my sleeves,
as I sloppily weave out raw poetry at the ends of my skirt while she’s not looking,
loosely tucking fervent yearnings between cotton pleats for you to thumb through,
and hoping that my verses are worth more stares than the thighs they cover.

Take my growth.

Take all the pieces of my heart that fell the day I cracked it open in front of you,
foolishly thinking it was fortune cookie I could somehow draw a lesson from,
and that the acidity of acceptance was a taste I had to acquire until I no longer gag
at every I should’ve and I could’ve that comes with saying your name out loud.

Take every crease and every tear searing across my fragile, unripe skin
from having the cost of loving forcefully rip apart my soul from this child’s body,
as I sift through what little is left and cut all my fingers trying to piece together
the woman you need me to be, and the woman I need myself to be.

Take my hope.

Take every star left illuminating across the cold and empty galaxies of my eyes,
where the only constellations I can seem to trace are those that point to you,
spilling incandescence over all the spaces that stretched too far between us,
and finally shedding light into the hungry mouths of apologies and hello agains.

Take every tomorrow and every someday I tuck under my pillow at night
with an optimism kept burning by nothing more than just the warmth of your smile,
as loving you from afar teaches me what it truly means to have a religion:
faithfully holding on to a promise I never heard, a hand I can no longer hold.

Take my time.

Take the patience bleeding out of me like sand from a broken hourglass,
as I slowly begin to unravel my mistakes from the unforgiving hands of a clock,
knowing well that the yesterdays of the last three years are not enough for me,
so I save all my everydays and my evermores in a box with your name on it.

Take my heart and every fraction of a second it takes for it to beat,
as it longs for the warmth of the home it once found on the palm of your hand,
withstanding all the flames that engulfed the paradise precariously built around it,
and out of the ashes, still rising to beat for you: but still, but still, but still.

This is for the one I love.

Funny how such a small thing can cause me such happiness. A chain reaction: mistakes caused me regret, I destroyed myself from the inside out, sadness envoloped me, my loved ones kept me afloat until she came, I learned, and now I'm on a marathon.
Gonna keep running with her, and we're never gonna see that finish line.

The first man I loved,
was intelligent...
he read, cooked, and cleaned.
But as a severe alcoholic -
he was 2 people -
also cold, ruthless, and mean.
My father was an abuser with a heart...
it was so hard to hate him
when he always had so much love to give.
All that love,
and he gave his daughter hate.
I'm a daddy's girl
who's 'daddy'
taught his girl to love abuse.

At 12 years old,
my first of many things,
was a 16 year old skater.
He was artistic, charming, and ambitious:
My first was also my dad's dealer.
Despite knowing this,
I still believed that he was my Prince charming.
There is no fairy tale
that mentions the Prince
being schizophrenic, volitile, controlling, or manipulative…
but I was young
and my heart was naive enough
to fall for his games.
My first molded an addiction into me
by teaching me,
in my 12th year,
to love manipulation.

I almost gave away my last name
to a man I fell for at 18 years old.
He loved history,
was a hard worker,
and he always knew what to say and do
when it mattered most.
Happily-ever-after doesn't always look like perfection,
but I almost married a perfect fabrication
of "true love".
Once the facade became too much -
I met PTSD, displeasure, neglect, and misery.
In chasing after the lies he painted,
I sacrificed all of myself
by keeping his truth
as permanent company.
I had wanted to save him so badly,
that I was willing to lose my identity
if it meant he found his.
After almost 2 years
of mental and emotional abuse,
the last man I loved sober,
taught me to love self sacrifice.

The men in my life
showed me what it means
to be the woman
who can never truly let go.
I have always retained the lessons
I learned from life,
and applied them.
After 21 years,
what I learned to love was
abuse,
manipulation,
and self sacrifice.

What I Learned To Love...
Was Destroying Myself.

What I learned in school,
is what being damaged to does to you.
It teaches you struggle is a bad word
and that success is effortless
if you’re not perfect right away
you’re not right
at all
your words only have value
according to the rubric
your cries of pain are only noteworthy
when the wound blisters scarlet red
and sticks and stones are as harmless
as the air used to launch them,
never mind that they broke your spirit well before your bones
they’re just kids.

I was a kid too.
Yet you locked me behind
an iron desk for first an hour, then two,
because despite how desperately I pleaded,
you assumed that because you cared,
that meant you couldn’t hurt me.
I have no scars on my skin to
show you,
unless you count the words I never wrote
because thinking about this made me choke.

And writing about it made it real.

You don’t get a scar
when your body is convinced it can no longer draw breath,
and you learn to count to four and hold for four
before you ever open up a trig book
to page four.
I have scars because I am here to be healed,
I am here, still.

Trees that fall in forests don't scar,
but the grove where they once stood misses them.

This is how I rode my bike every day after school,
I rode it back home safely as I could.

Because I learned to shoulder my weight in gold
and understand on my own terms
that my gold standard
is the only one worth anything to me.