“I was looking for you in all the places our love used to be. When all along I should have been looking for me.”

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.

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.

I would throw down roots with you if I ever had the chance. We’d grow strong in tender shoots, and bloom in burning hands.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

If quick, I survive. If not quick, I am lost. This is “death.

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

Some things were better lost than found.

We can help the world live without fear. It’s our only hope, without hope we are lost.

What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.