“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 are what it feels like to watch the final silvers of sun fall and die into the silver ocean; tangerine sky giving way to moon-glow and starlight.

We weren’t written in the stars; all that glitters wasn’t ours.

Last night, I sent you home with a kiss and a promise. I hope you still believe in roses.

Our story bleeds from my eyes until I cannot tell the stars from streetlights.

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.