Everything that we hold dear -
Destroys us.

We keep holding on.

They gazed in wonder at the sky -
Colors splashed across the canvas;
Violet, blue, indigo,
Green, orange, red, yellow.
They called it picturesque, and then,
Went home to appreciate,
A man who had closed all gates,
On groups of people
Based on race,
Based on color,
Based on faith.
The hues of their skin were not
Enough to secure a place,
Within a world they sought to start
A new life, but they forgot -
The darker shades of their skin,
Made them kindred
To all sin,
Made it fair
To prevent
Any soul from stepping in.

Color, now, is an abuse,
If your skin,
Is all the wrong hues.

I caught a solar flare

It tore somewhere between your words
And my impending despair

You see I was taught to watch the world in three dimensions
To view life in bold colour

Yet sometimes
All I need are your black and white letters upon a flat page

I was the only challenge I really needed
It was you who told me;
I didn't have to be what they want.

I saw a star burst behind that flare,
Its silent explosion was beautiful within its destruction
And I questioned whether life ended there;
Or whether it was creation.

It turns out that I am lost without you.

There was an astronaut
...I believe
Caught between the flare and his own implosion on the outskirts of the explosion.
I watched him disintegrate,
His dust formed its own miniature universe
And when everything settled down
He was still there.

I thought about you
As the stardust in my eyes

As the droplets of ink

As the correlation of all the far reaches

We are three dimensional.
We are colour
Riding the cusp of a solar flare
On the verge of destruction
Yet,
At the birth of creation.

We are the stardust that lingers in the eyes of life.

I fail to see any other reality than us.

Leave me
basking in the chaos
of my unstable mind
drunk on my fantastical thoughts
high on my imagination
and slowly tripping
into feelings
I know I can
pin down
to reality
with the tip of my
pencil

I've written a thousand words that have trailed behind me for decades.
If I attempted to turn around and pick them all up as if I'm collecting shells from a beachside, it would be wheelbarrows full.

Write.
Just write Natasha.
Quit attempting to perfect this gift and just let it unravel.
Don't criticize, judge or feel
Guilt over your need to shut away and bleed the thoughts that you're unable to speak onto paper.

Release the fear that captivates you. It's that uneasiness in knowing the pain that spills once I form these words into being readable and they sink into my heart and become truth.
Truth equals pain for me.

It's the fear that this truth might just **** me.
Is it possible to die of a broken heart, I often ask myself.

Battling this fear to write this novel is the one thing holding me back from healing.

Allowing my entire being to sink into it, and rage against the words as if I'm the flat of the ocean being ravished by the never ending waves.

Tossed and turned by the emotions that come with the process that forces you to heal.

It's the still, that resides between each word written, that quiet space that leaves me restless.

Calm the infuriation, unclench your teeth and let the words be written into reality.

My need to burst into a blood pumping release that lightens my heart from this heaviness is enough to shake the floor of the ocean.

We are each called on mission to touch someones life, or to be touched. When a person writes, all their feelings, mind, and emotion go onto that 8.5x11" sheet of paper. She may not have a spiral notebook, but will always have ink or graphite and something to write on; for she knows not when the lightbulb in her brain will blink. The lightbulb goes on in the strangest places: driving, in the grocery line, at the gas pump, or even on the toilet. She must have that ink ready, she'll write on her hand if she has to. At times, the only tree to suffice is a paper towel or toilet paper, but she makes due.
    He always attempts to use words that will evoke feeling and is not afraid of the darker side of human nature, or himself. He crosses words out, moves them around, lets it sit for a day and starts over. The editing process never stops; he picks out poems from ten years ago and switches things to fit today, but always keeps the original.

We may write in hopes that one day someone will read it and be touched, or we may use our pen as catharsis for ourselves alone.

Either way, we write.