Better to lay your spirit low.
Don't upset the ones who like you quiet.
And when your spirit freezes on the window screen,
The birds will watch the frost softly fall off into the snow.

When I look at you, I see your beauty.
And when I look deeper, I feel your pain.
Will the world, for once, truly see me?
Or will they only glance at me?
Reflection, how do you perceive me?
So Wrongly.
Self, how dishonestly you portray yourself.

You see me smiling-
But do you see the weight beneath my grin?
You see me standing tall-
But can you feel the cracks I've hidden in my skin?
Reflection, you're too kind, too naive,
Believing the face I show the world.

They've taken my words, my truths,
And turned them into weapons sharp as glass.
What I gave in trust, they twisted,
Used it to cut me where I'm most fragile.

So now I hide. I build these walls so high,
Even you, my reflection, can't climb inside.
I keep my pain locked tight behind my smile,
For fear of giving them the keys to destroy me again.

I wonder, reflection-
Are you a facade too?
Do I hide from you as much as the world,
Turning away from what's true?

Can I trust you?
Can you see past the armor I've forged,
Or are you just another wall I've built,
Keeping me from myself?

I'm afraid to look too closely-
What if you're just another lie?
What if I've buried the real me so deep,
That even my own eyes can't find me?

Until next time, reflection...
If I'm ever ready to face you again.

Suppression and revelation,
two entwined masters of destiny?

They take off my clothes

and smell my mouth and my heart --


whether I love you.

Media moguls
(The big six)

Media moguls, farming us like baboons, leaving just a flicker of our human potential; enough to consume.

A bitter machine, manufacturing and selling the illusion of fear and failure; ******* with our subconscious, spinning and expanding this dark material world; for nothing more than prestige and false profits.

There is more to life than this!
Wake up Space monkeys!

It is one thing to advocate for equality, representation, and unity.
Indeed, each is an inalienable, fundamental right.
But it is a whole new beast to lay waste
to anything that frightens you or that challenges your beliefs,
or that simply does not mirror your very own ideologies.
How heavy the hand of tyranny that now lays across our mouths,
yet how light our opposition.
Though I do acknowledge the delicacy of the issue at hand,
the fragility of the minds of hysterical mobs
who resolve to smashing windows in blind anger,
who ***** out free thought in daft castigation,
or who ban books even, it seems, like those monsters of history
to which they declare themselves to be diametrically opposed-
even in light of that, it is no excuse
to remain subservient to senseless autocrats
and the absurd legislations they bludgeon us with near daily.
To do this – to do nothing - is to lay down and die
without dignity, spineless and shameful,
though it seems that only myself and a handful of others
can recognize this.  Indeed, how easy it is to glimpse from the fringes.
I, a man of only twenty-seven years, do not recognize you, America.
I long for the days of comfort (so far removed from them, I am)
when I could safely retreat into the lofty and quiet halls of my mind
to enjoy a self-assuring thought that only I created -
a thought with no real purpose but to occupy me for a time,
to entertain me in my moments of dull apathy.
Now I shudder in a cold and contrived prison of vetted words
and unnegotiated mandates where I am told
to wrap myself in our flag to keep warm, to feel safe,
that this is for my own good.
I do not recognize you, America, for this thing you have become.

everything  got real quiet
and his thoughts opened up
and inspiration struck
and he knew that he was

it's not often he seems himself here
swimming through his cacophony of fears
he wonders whether he truly knows
the bounds of what his emotions hold

he wonders whether the eye of God shines itself upon him
knowing how deep and dark his need is for sin
it's not possible to know the truth of it
to know whether his emotions play him like a puppet

it's easy to see all from a birds-eye view
and he knows he'll look back and hate that he knew
what it was the entire time he was supposed to do

it's getting loud again so i think i should say
who this poem is written about on this day
his thoughts opened up and they went astray
he knows there's only one spot he can truly hideaway
so if you wonder who this poem is about
i guess you must look further than the words i spout

It begins as a tingling in my legs,
unpleasant like something squirmy trying to get out, something huger than my skin, wriggling, bursting to get free.

Without ceremony it spreads, bulging in my chest, prickles poking through my shoulder blades. Suppressing only makes it worse, I need to run, to fly, to breathe-

"What's wrong?" you ask.

I cannot answer, it is taking all my
willpower not to scream, or punch an
innocent bystander. Would I? Whether I would or not I've never found out,

I just leave.

"I love you," you say. I still cannot reply, the tears have been melting my face, but now they trickle down shiny scales.

External sensations have become
insensible, overpowered by the
overwhelming rage of barely managed fire within. The sharpness of my teeth meets an unfeeling leathery lip.

I go downstairs and leave the building. I don’t know if I remembered my keys.

I run
just as reptilian wings free themselves from my back, they flutter, stretch out wide at last.

I'm free,

but I still want this thing inside me, this thing that now is me, to leave. I am ashamed of it, afraid of its newness and my inability to control it.

It's happier now--
in the open air where it can thrash about without restraint. I let it, no longer worried it will lash out at something or someone breakable.

We fly far and long, my arms and lungs ache, but still the fire burns in my whole body waiting to be unleashed.

We soar, sore and angry until suddenly I'm alone again.

I look down but I don't need to look to know the scales are gone. My lip feels soft again beneath my rounded teeth. The wings still flap but gentler now, quietly bringing me back to the ground then softly folding and
painlessly absorbing back into my
shoulders.

I head home.

It is odd to think we are free,
And to idealize liberty, and to praise expression.
But how at large can we truly be,
If within, we can only draw upon unruly self-repression?

If in public, we dare not speak our minds?
If our love, we dare not confess?
If to wrongs, we turn blind?
If from singing our hearts, we digress?

We claim to be free,
The thought alone, within us, sets a torch alight,
But the truth for truth we must see,
When given a pen, hardly one of us would write.