✦
You must be willing.
You must DESIRE...
to sift through my raw material.
It will always be messy.
Unusual.
My heart is a rare and raw emerald-
patiently waiting in the dark...
to be unearthed.
To be discovered.
To be found.
✦
July 1st, 2018
Send me home
✦
When I'm not here-
and when I'm gone…
Please, if you ever loved me-
turn me into poetry...
send me home.
✦
July 1st, 2018
Bleeding heart
✦
They say there is beauty
in pain-
and I believe them...
for there are pages
and pages of beauty I have left exposed-
on paper...
burned...
or not yet composed...
for my heart holds poems that even I cannot write.
But what they do not say or understand...
is that this pain has been my friend
for so long-
has been the art that I hang on these walls...
hidden behind the closed doors of my chest...
pinned to my
sleeve.
So close
that I cannot tell
the difference between pain and me.
And when that pin
decides it is time-
for this heart to bleed or heal (what is the difference)...
it bleeds.
Flows so furiously slow down the vein of my heart and through this pen...
So much a part of me
that I cannot tell
where poetry ends and I begin.
And...
I am afraid.
I am afraid if I release this pain from my blood-
unpin this pain from my heart...
that this most trusted friend will finally leave me-
taking with it all the stories from my pages...
Don't you see?
I have to keep it.
✦
December 14th, 2018
Castaway...
✦
Anchored to this illusion-
I call out from the darkness...
someone, please come find me.
I keep searching for my lighthouse...
you must understand-
I want to be found.
But my soul is ocean glass, being shaped by these raging waves
and the thoughts that overtake me in these quiet hours that seem to have no end.
Drowning in the weight of what it means to be me.
I'm so lost out here
in this unforgiving sea.
✦
December 13th, 2018
Endings
✦
It’s almost sundown
in this lonely town...
one by one, lights go out-
the stores they close down.
Everyone’s grabbing last coffee, last call...
and I find myself searching for a face...
someone to be you for awhile.
Now there’s nothing left but coldness
as the candle fades
from blue flame...
as my heart lingers...
in this stillness.
Is this how is happens?
While cities sleep?
People becoming strangers
in the shade of streetlights...
the sound of goodbye
still stuck in my throat-
so many things left unsaid...
still it seems
I don't know you anymore.
Seasons changed...
the reasons were few-
and I could feel your effort
as I tried to slow the passage
of pebbles through the sandglass.
And now too much time has passed...
though too much has happened to forget-
but hearts are made to be broken
and bridges are meant to be burned...
So I'm ending this tonight.
No more passing in the streetlight-
avoiding your eyes.
Haunt me in the shadows-
set me free...
like the night waiting for dawn.
✦
2008
Under the elders
✦
There are forests that hold my oldest memories.
Where I whispered.
The bleeding heart. The dripping honey.
Writing poems with fingertips on the stones and soil.
Only the trees remember.
In my darkest nights, they spoke softly to me...
"There is beauty in the breakable, broken things...
surrender...soften...exhale.
Whatever you fear- it is not here.
You are home."
✦
March 29th, 2018
I am
✦
I am tattered tales and soft as silk.
I am silence, I am music.
I am the thorn, I am the rose.
I am the rocks and the rivers flow.
I am the stories held and stories told...
I am broken, I am whole.
I am the shadows and the sun.
I am everything, I AM NONE.
I am the lock, I am the key.
I was caged and now I'm free.
I forget and I remember...
Who I am...
sweet surrender.
✦
March 22nd, 2018
Storytellers
✦
We are the storytellers...
The bleeding hearts...
the lovers, the fighters...
the survivors.
We are the flowers and trees that ripped through the seeds;
fought our way out of darkness to reach for the light.
We've risen from the fires and survived to tell the tales...the embers still glow deep inside our hearts and guide our way home.
Listen closely...
Our story is an ancient one...
of broken hearts and battles won and all the parts that shatter and come together in the most heart-breakingly beautiful ways...
of making something beautiful from the pain.
This is our medicine. This is how we heal.
These sacred stories dwell and grow and burn within us all...
We invite you to gather-
if you have heard the call...
Is there a story YOU wish to tell?
✦
March 3rd, 2018
Surrender...
✦
My eyes search your eyes-
for something I’ve lost.
I find myself pulled in…
thought I felt something real in your touch.
Close your eyes-
a moment…
and now we’re in too deep.
Standing on the edge-
nothing more than breath on skin-
as though we had never breathed before each other.
Once tangled…
unraveled.
Bittersweet surrender…
Fallen…
hold the ground up to meet my feet.
✦
September 5th, 2017
Uncaged + undone...
✦
No cage could ever contain this heart of mine...
with it's unbreakable love and unbearable rage-
with it's 3am French pressed poems-
as I ride the tides...
the depth of darkness or the waves of ecstasy...
swelling, rushing, drifting on incense smoke-
in those ink black, uncounted hours of the soul.
✦
March 13th, 2018
Push
✦
Sometimes this world feels too small for our hearts-
too small for all the stories and poems we hold,
too small for all the pain
and too small for us all to fully expand into.
In all our beauty and thrashing.
So tell me, what can we do but push the boundaries of this world and of each other?
What can we do but tear the doors from these cages?
And what the fuck am I to do with all this love bleeding inside my heart,
in a world that doesn't seek to understand what love could be?
✦
August 25th, 2017
Warriors of light...
✦
Warriors of Light...
let the ancestors guide us...
our Lion hearts move us.
The blood of our bleeding hearts-
the marrow of our bones-
protecting all that is sacred.
And it is all sacred.
Our voice is our sword.
And Love is what we fight for.
Carve your words on cave walls and paint them on your flesh.
To tell them through the eons, that this is our battle cry.
And we will not sleep until the battle is won.
Wake up.
Rise up.
✦
March 14th, 2017
Holy holy holy
✦
There's something beautiful to be found.
How we are all so fucking broken, yet so whole and holy.
✦
August 18th, 2017
Lion heart
✦
The truth is...
I'm afraid you'll see my darkness.
My barren lands.
My suffering.
And that you'll think I cannot serve.
That I cannot survive.
That you'll think I cannot bring my own kind of healing.
That you'll not count me among the tribe.
But this heart has taken beatings.
Has bled for the poetry that flows from it's veins.
This heart has cracked and shattered and still fucking LIVED!
For many moons and many suns I've seen the darkness flooding the horizon.
Have felt the suffering of a body stolen.
A bird trapped in a cage and without a song.
All the carnage strewn about at the hour of sunset.
And I alone cannot heal that kind of brokenness.
When the hours grow dark,
those birds they still beat their wings inside my chest.
But this heart, she is a LION!
And this lion has already died a thousand deaths for songs unsung.
No more.
I am not just a bird without a song.
I am that lioness.
And I long to let out my roars
across those barren lands
And awaken myself and the world.
For I came to this place with flaming mane and claws that scratch and fight for life
and for love.
For truth and honesty.
For all the hearts that shatter and come together.
So here I am...thundering out of the darkness.
Heart pounding and bleeding.
Arriving and departing all at once.
Holding on and letting go all at once.
Living
and dying all at once.
So here I am...are you still with me?
Shall we come out of the shadows?
✦
April 14th, 2017
Of blood + bone
✦
I'm just so tired of being human.
It all hurts.
It's too much.
Too many people dying.
Too many people suffering and struggling.
And too many people not giving a damn about all of that.
And yet universes are made by collapsing stars.
So we collapse.
We collapse and we burn.
But where is our new universe?
I can't see it through the blood and bone and flames and smoke and ash of living.
And I'm just so tired of being human.
✦
September 30th, 2017
Starseeds...
✦
I do not understand
those
who do not feel things intensely.
Have you not lived?
Have you not loved?
Have you not tasted the salt
of poetry
as it slips from your tongue?
Have you not known sacred things...
and dark things?
What is life
and what is love?
And how do you know...
what it feels like...
to breathe deeply
to feel the full expanse of heart
against your rib cage?
When you have not known
all of these things in such a way
that it is the very truth of life
birthing starlight
under your skin...
✦
November 3rd, 2017
Rising
✦
When we sit in silence-
when we say nothing
and smile...
when we behave how they want-
they just love that shit.
Oh, they eat it up.
But when we open our mouths
for things other than pleasure…
when we roar like lions
and shake our fists at the sky...
they shut the fuck up and do you know why?
Because they are scared shitless of that shit.
The End.
✦
May 6th, 2017
From the embers...
✦
Campfire
Sage Smoke
Embers burning in the ash.
Always, in all ways
on my way through-
Transmuting. Transforming.
Into something new.
My light has come
always...in all ways-
from the flames.
This is the only path I know.
✦
March 11th, 2018
Wild honeysuckle
✦
I remember the warmth
of so many summer suns...
waking us in the dawn-
the grass wet with the dew of the morning
and I could smell the flowers blooming in the soil.
We climbed and lived in trees-
as we walked the world away...
we wandered
through fragrant woods,
over riverbeds
and inside mountains-
where we touched the earth at the edge of the sky.
I remember
those soulful whispers
as we kept our conversations hushed...
under weeping willows...
the taste of honeysuckle on your lips.
Pale skin washed
with amber splashed sunsets-
as we talked the hours away
like shadows from the fading sun.
Where promises linger on a mossy shade of branches
and of leaves...
and I remember
...the taste of wild honeysuckle...
✦
2015
"Wild Honeysuckle" was featured in the Bohemian Collective Magazine
Found
✦
We are the storytellers...
learning the language of love.
Ripping through sinew of heart...
cutting to the bone.
Sweet darkness swallow us whole.
Take us into your arms, we are not afraid.
For we are not from this place, take us home.
Let us journey to some other sunrise,
where leaves grow into trees.
There, we will be found.
✦
September 5th, 2017