“Meet me with authenticity or not at all.”

I must be worth something if my heart thinks so.

And what happens when you run out of words? You listen. Deeply. To everything around you.

Maybe I am something special but nothing spectacular.

I am hell-bent on loving my hell.

Think of how good tomorrow might be.

I love my sadness because it is honest.

You write poems or you are a poem. That is where you’ll shine.

Your love is only as good as your intention.

Your trauma is never indicative of who you are and how well you deserve to be loved.

Do you see who I am beyond your judgment? I lay with my core, and there is a force in there.

Don’t fear it. That pull between your heart and mind. It is trying to teach you. It is learning your language.

It’s hard to know who I am when who I am always swallows me whole.

If my skin is going to crawl, I pray it crawls into safer spaces.

I am learning that most of my fear of others is my own judgment of myself.

It is a valuable thing to learn the difference between who is in your corner and who is in your way.

Let your love be bigger than your anger.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.

As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.