“When I reached for what I wanted, they said I left my needs behind. But if all birds need is on the ground why then do they fly?”

It finally happened like I thought it might I run into you.

Hour 36 of labor. I pull at god’s necktie dig a hole at the hospital floor.

You can’t go to a kindergarten teacher after me.

One tornado I lived through got the house.

The argentinian kisses me on a beach in tulum.

May my children never read this.

You’re rolling me in coffee hands I’m u-turn smoked rubber coming back- oh I’m spent, ask on the still.

Oh the salt water I had to sweat to realize there was an ocean inside of me.

I found my old diary tonight. A brokenness I had forgotten pen pressured so deep it punctured page. I ran my fingers over my words and there inside ridges black I found a little girl desperate for someone to save her, desperate for the very woman I have become.

This morning I tell the kindest man on earth after two dates, you are good and you are not my man. My man is not as good as you.

I know this won’t always be a good deal for me I make it anyway.

Don’t get too used to being alone.

I want to be in an Jane Austen novel with you.

God is a woman and like every woman has millions of years of men speaking for her.

I keep saying over and over. I’m sorry but I have to go now you are not my person.

I play with the nativity and tell mary she looks good in that color blue.

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

If you lose an opportunity you will be like one who lets the bird fly away; you will never get it back.

Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last.

You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

You can cage the songbird, but you can’t make her sing. And you can trap the free bird, but you’ll have to clip her wings.

Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds.

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.