“Some days, my mind will still be in prison, but I will live in spite of it. I unlearn how to swim; I trade my gills for lungs and wings.”

Standing in your power scares a lot of people. You become something formidable, intimating, and aspirational all at once.

Poetry? That’s easy. I just cut the vein, and let it bleed.

Do I look as good as I remember, Looking back at you from over my shoulder, smug as the devil?

The day I made peace with my pain was the day I was born again.

“Ashes”, we once thought, but the embers in our eyes might have bought us time.

How do you sleep soundly, knowing you traded roses for weeds?

I am a phoenix living in a culture of vultures.

You’re preserved inside of me; cadaversque. I both acquiesce and atrophy because of it.

As if flesh and skin and hands are any match for bullets. As if bones won’t crack in hails of powder and lead. As if rivers of blood are not the direct result of trigger fingers that bend but do not break on “bad days”.

Love me until oblivion paints your portraits on my eyelids, sinking by eons into distance that never separates us.

I don’t know how to put my love down, or to keep holding too much of it.

Your darkness does not scare me, nor will I run from you; like a star, I’m falling for the phases of your moon.

We usually seek the divine in the sky, But religion is best found on the ground. Nature is our true creator.

When I was a child, I used to fear monsters under the bed. I have since learned that most monsters are found within. And they are always worth fighting.

I pressed the dress to my nose, and found what was left of your ghost. It was then that I remembered how to cry.

To the oppressed with no seat on the table; dreaming of change and better days, I will pull up a chair, and light fires in your name.

You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.

With experience in boxing, you learn how to be a scientific boxer and how to fight easy.

Maybe this time isn’t about finding love but rather learning how to enjoy your own company instead.

Maybe the lesson is not how best to chase the things we think will make us happy, but learning to be happy wherever we are instead.

You need to learn independence. You have to be independent – it builds character.

Inadequacy of his own strength, learned from experience, impels and urges a man to enlist the help of others.

You learn more about yourself through your child, I guess.

We shall prosper as we learn to do the common things of life in an uncommon way. Let down your buckets where you are.