“But are they protection or a cage? These ribs that ensnare my heart so.”

I am ruled by emotion. She is a fickle leader of a volatile kingdom, where conniving skies cast intemperate clouds over my constitution.

I looked again at my new ring and in that moment all I knew, was that the greatest of adventures would be revealed in with you.

Champagne on our lips and desire on our minds and you can leave those painful memories behind and you can bring your hand to my heart as we kiss. There’s nothing else but us on nights like this.

How are you yet to learn? I don’t want grand gestures. I don’t want the world on a plate, the best life has to offer, material things or flashy gimmicks. I just want you with me.

Burnt mirror, smeared glass. Do you like what you see? If my body is a temple, then my poetry is the darkest vestry. My mouth is a chalice, and these words are sacramental.

Still, I wrote. Even when the police where coming. Even when my whole body hurt, and the slightest sound would make me quake.

Go on then, color me broken whilst I feign my surprise. Let me summon some sorrow for this wreckage inside.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and watch me spark like a match tossed to tinder.

With all these past fears still written on my skin, it bruises me to let you in. Trauma’s that this body holds, still guard these tactile lips untold.

A seed of suspicion. A sprout of doubt. A sapling of worry. But what an oak of strength I’ve become.

I was told I could break free if I wanted to. That my wings would mend with time. But how can I mend a part of me that was never built to weather a storm?

Let me show you how words can make merriment from the most bitter melancholy. How words softly spoken, can heal even the most insidious of wounds.

Guess who’s flying free now? You, a mere speck of the ground. And I, lost and found amongst the clouds.

You pack your whole life away as many times as I have, and it’s no more than routine. But in you I’ve found a home, more so than anywhere I’ve been.

I couldn’t care less how much money a person has, or what their job title is. Show me a person who seeks out the beauty in a wreckage; who’ll take the remnants of their troubles and stitch a sail from the tatters.

What’s the end game? Well, when hate is your agenda, and my own is but love, then this game is not one in which you feature, and my end, is a far-flung world from yours.

What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.

He opened her cages, and freed the things inside.

The more you judge others. The more you cage yourself.

He was unhinged. Shameless. Everything wrong and everything right. And he held the key to my cage in his palm.

To set free my ideas while the world was still building a cage was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.

Skin is just the softest cage.

If it feels like a cage, then darling you are at the wrong place.

A gender line helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.