“Bound by rose thorns, pricked by love.”

The sky is on fire I am, too cigarette burns on my faded tattoo.

Blue dreams in ocean wading devotion I miss the waves of our healthy obsession.

As I feel your heart shatter like sand through my helpless fingers I envision ripples through the tar of your blood.

Moments passing evenings warning waves receding to everlasting tides.

Hearts retch on homestretch where will we go?

Sometimes I can’t believe I decided to heal even when I didn’t deserve it. Even when I did.

It’s funny how things can be so temporarily permanent.

It’s just me and my mangled limbs your touch soothing but unconvincing singsong whispers of lives unlived.

Maybe we’ll meet on the beach sand in our shoes, waves in our guts flowers blooming by some miracle because you always had the talent to make those happen.

You can hit me and push me but you can’t quite beat me.

You left flowers on my bedside as if I were my tomb clumsy words that don’t begin to heal my wounds “I’m sorry” scrawled on a post-it.

You are what you want, Do you want who you are?

It turns out the monster in you overshadowed the ghost of kindness I so believed in.

We burn incandescent memories lungs aching with washed-out oxygen as if we weren’t to meet again.

Down to the marrow in your bones, you will always be beautiful to me.

Everyone says the door is open with a smile until the door is not opened and the house collapses and they finally realize why they needed a door in the first place.

If I were a flower, you were the rain I was longing for.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

Maybe that’s why it was so easy for you to break me, you can always tear the pages of an open book.

You don’t share everything about you, so let’s not assume everything about them.

Sometimes a person is in peace & in the piece at the same time.

Everything we look for outside is always inside.

I shed skin after skin, seeking my true colors, expecting a rainbow or a stripe of black, but all I get are maps of red. We are all human underneath.

There is no better time to start than now.