Verbatim

  Somewhere deep inside me I am that little girl screaming on the floor of a pitch black bathroom. Where no one is coming looking for me. Where I am too much of not knowing why I am here and why no one wanted me. Why HE never wanted me. And that is okay. That little girl needs a hug. She needs to be seen. She needs love. She is not I anymore. I am powerful enough to not seek to be seen. I am, and in being, I am beheld. In loving, I am loved. I AM LOVE. Look, at how far we’ve come. Six and a half years ago I was living out of my car not knowing when the next time would come that I could hold my son. LOOK at how far we’ve come. From falling asleep to car alarms and gunshots out the window to a place to call our own, a place we turned into home. Look at how far we’ve come. EYE picked myself up and threw me over my own shoulder to climb this mountain. Feet bloody, face stained in tears and sweat. EYE did that. EYE stared death in the face and she looked back and shook her head and said...

In times of sadness Years of salt-stained cheeks Generations of being told what to say and when to speak I hope it is then you realize You are everything you seek How reflection reveals your best parts blessing the very world which surrounds you I hope one day you can fully see Truly bask in your own whimsy Each precious footstep resounding positivity Rippling into a quiet legacy Lingering in the corners of our sons’ sparkly grins Braided into our daughters’ bold tongues The fires of our children both learned and loved  Your mother’s tears Free fall into your riverbeds  Carving through stubborn earth  How we built a life from these heartaches together Raised up villages to raise generations to come How we have multi-handedly undone Short-fallen expectations of what they thought we would become  We are women  Gateways from places unimagined  Unhinged spirits tied into pretty bows We are as fierce as we are underestimated Complexities of human nature intuitiv...

Man, I feel so lucky you still think I’m fun Not gonna lie, I’m milking it as long as I can Because you’ll always be my number one My first real love No matter how tough When we disagree When you say things you don’t mean You’re learning these emotions the same as me And I get it, We’re doing our best Mistakes happen, No one is perfect All I ask is that we always communicate with love and respect I love you more than there are stars Praying for endlessly cloudless nights to remind you of that Every sunset reminds me how I never want to spend one without you Competing with a tide of hormones and outside influences I let go of an instinct to control and confine And instead hope to guide you To your own path My little man My almost up to my shoulder man You make me proud everyday You are the truth behind every corny love cliche Sunshine in the rain The rainbow after a hurricane The heart I stitched into my sleeve You are everything to me That’ll never change No matter how much you change ...

I’m so into you, into you, into you Like I never thought I could be Buried these feelings a little before you met me I’d grown so used to Being “too much” and “not enough” simultaneously Vibrant beginnings instilling  Revitalized hope Weird, eccentric, goofy… Whatever we may be You make my crazy feel a little more Harlee than Joker Like, idk if I would die for you But I’d at least break you out of Arkham if you needed me I’m so into you, into you… fuck, I’m so into you It’s a little scary Like, maybe I never stopped believing in fairytale endings And we are far from perfect Far from starting anything too serious too soon But I see a happily in front of any amount of time with you  My past makes me fear talking of futures Like, I don’t want to jinx this you know? I just want to grow with you Wanna wake you up every morning to your favorite kind of cold brew Naturally sweet Or your favorite kind of breakfast in bed Also naturally sweet

Wait Can we hit snooze real quick on this goodnight? I’m not ready to turn off the lights I need five more minutes of staring into your eyes Eight more minutes of tense sighs and alibis for thoughts we have yet to speak into existence Holding onto straggling strands of silence Between our giggles and suggestive conversations Give me thirty more minutes into these witching hours Casting spells and guttural howls Beneath quiet boundaries where we play coy with our curiosities Wandering around words, Tiptoeing untold stories Fighting the urge to say I’ve been daydreaming of the way you taste Fantasizing how your fingers feel wrapped around my waist Lost in a sea of waves of raven hair How we touch like prayer But move like born-again sinners Horns holding up halos Patience growing thinner Willpower waning Every time you whisper my name Together we wield a powerful magic No static when we mix these potions Spirits and sodas inspire divine motions between us Got me reading about our Venus c...

There is something so romantic about cigarettes The way they hang from an artists lips As they’re leaned up against bricks One leg up they inhale and exhale toxins The fashion of quietly killing themselves But I don’t see it All I see is The rise and fall of breaths The unexpected beauty of a slow death

At what point did this pursuit of love become addiction Itching for a scratch of that pen against parchment Parched for a diction to define the idolatry of such idle demise Slow-churned thoughts surmise fantastical connections Washing away any glimpse of self preservation Self respect Self love Every time I think I’ve risen in the throes of blissful romance I find myself falling prey to foolery even Tom would not condone

My heart aches like a splinter buried deeply in the soil of my flesh Dirty from your touch Still lush from your kiss Now parched from the drought you left 

Familiar sensations stem from familiar temptations Love making disguised as meaningless relations My biggest secret is I don’t know how to touch without touching souls  Transferring so much more than saliva Spiritual entwined with cerebral Tongues talking like old friends from past lives through cups on cosmic strings whispering silent I love yous between the lines of your lips

You can’t contain a flame without causing wildfire Or snuffing out her wild  Suffocating the oxygen from her dance of airs Flowing through red orange auras of the untamed Her mane aglow  Spires spreading outstretched Searching for something she could touch without destroying

In some ways My stubbornness has kept me alive Helped me survive with Foggy sighs subtly dimming a daft shine of blinding light  Positivity playing as my most favored shield My heart, a sword Cutting into this world relentlessly Irreverently seeking healing through the wounds of others My sadness, a sheath to such self-inflicted cuts For people like me, it’s easy to love To see so much in others I cannot easily see in myself  Depression digs deeply at my roots Reminding me to be unapologetically selfish Withdraw my sword and remind myself that it’s okay to rest This spirit needs nourishment This mind needs respite  This heart needs comfort  This body needs 8 hours of sleep tonight

I’m not crazy, weathered at worst Like early days of earth Rubble rock birthing life from  violent destruction Fires burning molten in the underbelly of my origins Bubbling beneath cracked surfaces Where I oftentimes appear stable My heart is a volcano Bursting at the seams where new ground must form Former foundations crumbling, splitting like Pangaea  Where connections we once had feel like nothing more than distant history Evolution of man How he crawled out of water to feel sun upon his face How I would wait hundreds of thousands of years  In hopes he’d emerge from darkness to find me Staring out into space The nostalgia of quiet combustion Peering into past lives in the distance Knowing most of what I know to be beautiful is dead I am a supernova  Bursting at the seams where new life may form  Gathering masses from stray debris Gasses and gravity Nebulous love Pulling together new solar systems  in ancient designs and unwritten formulas Life is messy S...