You were supposed to love me til death do us apart.
But Then you let go and decided to trample my heart.
You've turned love into a lie and made heartbreak a work of art.
It was something I should have seen coming from the very start.
I was so foolish. Choosing someone like you wasn't at all very smart.

I fell in love with you because I knew your heart and knew who you were.
Now everything good about you has been wiped away, now a blur.
When I told you I loved you I meant it. I didn't stutter nor slur.
Now, after all is said and done I wish this charade had never occurred.

My heart, soul, time and tears were all taken advantage of.
Oh, how you lied to me because what you offered was never love.
In spite of the suffering I went through by you, I still considered you sent from above.
You disregard the times I treated you like a queen, when you were my white dove.
When my heart utterly melted for you. When your beauty was my treasure trove.

Now that its all over, you've given love a bad name.
Now that its over, I'll never look at it the same.
Love is no longer beautiful. Its a disgrace, a pity, a game.
Because of you Ill probably never find true love and that's a real shame.
However, I do hope someday I can find another that'll light my heart aflame.
But for now its a darkness a void. Because of you that's what love has became.

So many voices yelling and echoing and cluttering up
Every heartbeat with dissonant commands;
Discordant rhythms
That give chase, pulse racing wildly ahead,
But I can never escape because the speaker is

Myself.

Who taught me these monologues of doubt?

I’m trying to find some dark corner to crawl into
And hide
From all of the should be’s
And didn’t you’s
And what if’s
And why aren’t you good enough to
And why can’t you just fix everything
And why aren’t you strong enough
To just live
And not break at every streak of light
Surmounting the dregs of night when the morning returns again
And still there is a feeling of falling
And not knowing if you should reach out and hold onto something,
Or not?

And so you just grip your coffee cup as if it were
A solitary rock
In the middle of
A storm-whipped sea
And I really just need to wrap myself around
Something that is made of clay
And dirt,

Drag my spirit through the veins of the earth,
Where the cut-banked canyons rise into a
Reddened western sky  
And release the broad-winged birds to flight.

And everything is quiet

And I know my worth:

No more or less than the brush along the shore.
No more or less than the darting shapes across the river’s floor.
No more or less than the dusk,
Than a gentle touch across my face,

Than love;

No more or less than love

And how it spills like water over rocks
And moves like music through the blood

And how the morning becomes quiet
And I am
Just
Singing softly to my children,

I won’t give up.

Resting your head on the side of the bathtub,
Half-hoping you won't fall asleep and slip under the water.

Walking into the street without looking both ways,
Half-hoping you won't be hit by a car or some other vehicle.

Running down the stairs, taking them two at a time,
Half-hoping you won't trip and fall all the way, all the way down.

Turning off the oven after cooking your dinner,
Half-hoping the gas hasn't leaked and isn't filling your entire house.

Leaving a candle lit for a moment as you leave the room,
Half-hoping it won't fall over and set your bookshelf ablaze.

Doing any number of seemingly monotonous chores,
And half-hoping your mind won't hope for the dreadful way it could



end.

The great arms of the cottonwoods release fragments of
Themselves across the evening sky,
As if the edges of clouds could
Lift from the flutter of leaves
And drift out and away,
As if giving up fragments of oneself
Is soft and easy,
Like the bend of the river
Around the greening banks
On a gentle summer day.

Like giving up is not brutal
Or bones cracked on the cold tile of the
Bathroom floor
When you can’t even do this anymore
And there are tears laid around you like bright
Flowers of pain
Spilled and wilted and dried up again
And you curl into yourself
And simply wait for
The end.

There is a giving up in that roughness and there is a giving up in
The radiance of the sun
Emanating from the warm rocks at the edge of the cliffs,
Lifted off the backs of the verdant hills,
And there is a giving up that is a gift
And not an acquiescence.

And thus it is,
Like the river’s edge,
I give up this familiar space
To the flooding of the rains;

Take the banks of all I know
And allow their swift erosion
Down to the vulnerability
Of my soul.

I give up the strongholds
Of dread
And cast these crafted layers to the edges of the stars

And I won’t give up the openness of my heart,

Or the way I can see so far
Across this wild, limitless wilderness
Of hope,

Or how it grows
Within the shelter of your hands.

Can’t take it easy, not this time
Watch, I am covered in all this grime
Wish it was easy, just this time
Hear, I am wheezing a mournful whine

I think I will let myself fall
The way down is not so long
I never reached your height, never was tall
I never was as strong and now I’m gone

In the end
I wish I could see
But there is nothing to mend
And no reason to flee

In the end
I wish I could feel
There is no reason to stand
Or even to kneel

In the end
We all die alone
To death we bend
Lost without a home

Now it seems so easy to me
I let myself glide through the wind
Maybe...
This is my only chance to be free

When the branches are weary
And the leaves could only
Helplessly fall on the ground,
The birds sigh in unison.

When the clouds are in deep burden—
They try to hold it in for quite a while
Until a sudden downpour occurs,
And nostalgia creeps into every person.

As you watch all these happen,
You come to realize that sometimes
It's okay to just give in to the universe,
Because beauty isn't always in holding on.