There's no more room within me to be small.
Not when a heart of courage calls for greatness
That frightens me with paralyzing pleas
To make the world
A better place.
Or when a soul so resolute to love
Refuses to heed reason.
The unknown, lurking in the shadows
Is a monster...
Yet we coexist.

There's no more room within me to be frightened.

03/07

This silence, so discrete, 

Perfectly hiding

Every explosion painting the gray matter of the mind

With brilliant flashes-

Blinding eyes and golden tears,

Overwhelms me

With a ringing deafness. 

Renaissance

Reading through my old blogs and comparing them to what I have recently written,
I find the absence of a soul.

I've gained so much
And somewhere, poetry was lost.

The movement that whispered through the syllables
With silent grace
Or broken anguish...

Was carelessly replaced
With perfect punctuation,
Worthless meaning.

You feel the absence of a soul
Deep in your gut
And in the hollow where the heart
Would rest,
Where golden light
Is gone.


It's about time I taught this soul to sing again.

Something Beautiful

I'm afraid sometimes that I will lose the power to create.

Every individual needs to be an artist. It's in our blood. Our ancestors created things: useful things, beautiful things, inspirational things. They created to stay alive. We are no longer asked to create. We are asked to regurgitate. There is no room for beauty, unless we use beauty to enhance our career, in which case people slap a label onto you (photographer, journalist, model...) and grade your work on a rubric scale.

You pour your soul into the world and people tell you the contrast isn't good enough, but go ahead and try again to recapture that moment that can never happen again. Or that instant your heart felt raw enough to remold.

I've stopped writing for others. I enjoy sharing my soul with those who will not criticise me. It's nothing more than evolution. But I've stopped seeking approval, writing in iambic pentameter, or drawing with anything other than crayola colored pencils. Because that's all it takes to create something beautiful.

And that's all I need to get me through the day.

Shhh...

You're not a little girl anymore. You can't make a mistake and crawl back into mommy's lap to make both of you stop crying. Now if you try to hold her and make her stop, you'll twist a knife into her heart. Figuratively. And be tempted to twist one into your own. Literally.

You promised yourself that things would get better.

Take it back 14 years. You told yourself it was your fault, you were just a bad kid. They made up stories about family friends telling strangers you were bad. You knew you were bad. You waited to grow up and be good. Then you moved here. Your heart broke from leaving everything you knew behind. You were bad because you spoke no english. You learned english, but that didn't make you good. Kids were cruel. You were different. You were bad. You tried to do better in school, because that's what everyone did. But it was too late. Now being

smart made you bad. You had to be special. You tried to be special, but in highschool, everyone wanted to be the same. Ironically, this meant being unique. You were so bad that your own father stopped talking to you. You dated jerks to have someone to sit with at lunch. Your friends did drugs. drank. left you behind. were selfish. But you were the bad one. Your boyfriends cheated on you. Broke you. Made you forget to trust. Made you disgusting. Pushed you. Your parents did not listen. Because you were bad. Not even worth fixing.

But good people came and started fixing you, started loving you. Good friends. Good guys to date. Good teachers to be rolemodels and mentors. A perfect little brother to teach you the joy of family. You learned that God was about love, not about sin. You became good. But she hasn't changed. And they still see you as a bad person. But you have to remember you were NEVER bad. You were broken, but you are allowed to be, and people will love you. "I don't think you get it," they say, "we love you BECAUSE you're broken."

Broken is not bad. Broken is human.

You will never be good in her eyes. It's a cold reality. But you don't have to be, because you are loved. The people who see you as bad cannot deal with their own emptiness and hurt.

"We are too different to understand each other." Yes. I think people cannot be bad. You think everyone is bad. I will never speak another bad word to you. Never anything you can judge. Silence is golden and I will only share my light with those who see it. I wish I could share it with you, because I want permission to love you, but loving you will kill me. So I'm sorry I'll always be bad in your eyes, but I can't just grow out of it. So I'll just be quiet and selfish. You can live in your bad world.

I'm too busy being broken and perfectly good.

Meetings

"Here is a gift I will give you both.

There-is-a-rose-the-most-beautiful-rose-you-can-ever-imagine-

FEEL IT!

See it grow inside your mind

Breathe its beauty

See it, see, see, see, FEEL!

shhhhh...

It's gone.

Now only you will know its beauty and only

it

will know fully the beauty inside of

you."

"Read the Scriptures. Every time that they mention water, they mention truth. Jesus walked on water, He walked on truth. And maybe you don't want to hear the truth, but there it is, like water, pouring down on you! You gave me truth and now I'm giving it back to you."

Death is a saint. You must learn to fear the things more frightening than death...

"From your new friend."

The skeleton took my hand. I withdrew, afraid. The cold hand was there, and the broken smile of the skull spoke without words. "You can hide from Me," she seemed to say, "But you can never know truth without knowing me."

So much water in blood.

I took her hand. Truth poured upon me like a waterfall, threatening to crush my bones. But I told my mouth not to scream and my heart to stop beating---

---I waited for God. He came. He came back, took me in His arms, like the Prodigal Son, He kissed my scars and read me Issaiah 40:31 and 1 Corinthians 13. He loved me and forgave the blackness I can never forget. In the three heartbeats that my heart missed, I relearned to breathe. Something bloomed in my heart, errupted from a bud, as He whispered encouragement I had forgotten into my soul---

I woke up and dreamt of love. It is a living feeling. He brings us home with love.

Coming Home

We sat at a round table, eating dinner when he came in. I noticed him, but you paid no attention. For a second, I thought perhaps he was still alive.

There was no plate set out for him.

You sat down across the table and I sat, looking at you, then back at him. He sat at my right side. His hands were folded and he watched me eat.

You asked: "what do you keep looking at?" and made useless conversation.

I lowered my eyes and tried to ignore the ghost. My eyes burned with frustration and the food tasted like rubber. The conversation built, just like a pile of rubbish, upon my heavy soul until it drowned in the blood surrounding my heart.

"Do you not SEE him?" I interrupted you. You looked at the dead man and he looked back at you. You sighed.

"I do," you said. I threw my arms around his neck and held him. He felt so alive. "I missed you." And his voice, alive:

"I missed you, too."

The three of us sat at the couch, talking the night away. In the morning, he would be gone.

Then the alarm clock rang and the ghost slipped from my arms. I reset my alarm and pushed my mind back asleep, but a new dream came

and the ghost had burned himself into my mind.