“How do you sleep soundly, knowing you traded roses for weeds?”

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.

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.