Dear god,

I wish you were real, but the dangers coming from your people contradict everything you stand for.

What of the crusades? Couldn't they have been stopped? Only one of them was won. Maybe that is how your disapproval has been shown. But still, most christians I know hate me. I used to be one of them. I hated people like me, all in the name of serving you. I just didn't realize what it meant to be different.

I remember my parents telling me nose piercings were a sin. They said that people should be satisfied with blending in. They said that we should want to disapear, to give our souls up to the lord. And that anyone who wanted to be unique could face the fiery river at the end of the world.

Now I am one of those people. I am a person who chooses not to blend in, who chooses to question your undeniable words written in tongues of old. I have chosen to question these things because no one deserves to burn for what they believe in. No one deserves to burn for who they are. No one deserves to have their life taken for a piercing or tattoo. Now that I'm older, I see just how rooted in prejudice and racism those ideas were. You said Jesus came down to give grace to all people, that no one was exempt. Well, I choose to exempt myself. I don't want to stand by those who draw a line in the sand, deciding who is good and who is evil. Nothing is that simple. But, neither do I want to forget the lessons I learned in church of gratitude and acceptance. Never mind, I do. Because when I wanted to tell the world how much my mom hurt me, my uncle came up to me and said, "This is not what Christ would want you to do. Just accept it. Just be grateful for what you have." I almost threw him off the roof. Did he think Christ would want me to sit and watch as my life was taken from me one freedom at a time. Would he want me to live in the shadows, never daring to escape because of the fear I lived in everyday? Do you want me, your own child, to suffer? Just so someone like my mom can continue unpunished.

I didn't used to think there was evil in this world. Now, I know there is. I wish I didn't, but I do. I wish you existed, but you don't. I wish there was some salvation, but there isn't. There is only me. There is only one person to help me out of a rut and that is me. I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. I stopped begging. I stopped asking for your help. It never came. I'm not Jobe. I give up.

Just because I write poetry doesn’t means all you can read it, even though you probably have heard it on repeat on videos I post online.

You’ll never know the true meaning behind it or if I wrote it with tears pouring down my face, because in reality you can’t read pass the facade of my skin.

I’m more than my appearance, that is something you can’t see. I’m greater than the words I cut on paper.

You think you know me from the words I spill, but you miss the ache behind every syllable.

I hide myself in metaphors, buried in lines, because exposing the truth means crossing the signs.

And yet, my voice is just a whisper in the crowd, they hear what they want, see what they choose, judging my strength by what I refuse to lose.

Each verse is a fragment of my soul, a piece of the puzzle you’ll never complete.

You see the lines, the rhythms, the rhymes, but you overlook the scars and the healing behind each line I write.

I pour my heart onto the page, a quiet rebellion against the noise, hoping someone, someday will truly listen.

But in a world filled with loud voices and quick judgments, my whispers often drown beneath the clamor.

So I write, not just to be heard, but to create a space where my truth can exist, free from the constraints of perception.

I will continue to weave my emotions into words, to hide my essence in metaphors, because even in the shadows, it’s mine.

And perhaps, one day, someone will look beyond the facade, beyond the surface, and discover the depth of the heart that beats behind the ink.

I’m an open book in a world people aren’t willing to read, I say I have few friends but no one listens to me.

“See you later” you said just to never speak to me again, happened twice or thrice before, so I knew you would be the same.

Same as people I write about to forget, just to recall my lack of self love, what a regret.

I love people for the both of us, I disarm the puzzle of my heart for them, tore it apart so they are given what they deserve.

It is not that I’m not capable of loving myself, empathy is what runs through my veins; I tend to sacrifice myself for others, claiming it to be acts of service, to destroy what lies within me for a chance of redemption.

Maybe I’m a stranger to myself too, looking at my reflection, wondering who I’ve become. I crave love like it’s air, but I forget to breathe my own, searching for a part of me in others, only to lose it once again.

Have you ever felt that, too?

Like giving everything just to feel seen?

I wonder how many of us walk this earth, quietly breaking apart to keep others whole.

You don’t say anything to avoid conflict, but live in conflict for saying nothing.

But what if I started speaking, dared to let my voice echo in empty rooms?

Would I shatter this fragile peace or finally find a way to breathe?

Would the world learn to accept me, or would I finally learn to accept myself?

To the ones who bite their tongues, hide their tears behind polite smiles.

I see you, let’s not confuse silence for strength, nor call neglect a form of love.

{...audio link below}

The red bird was her favorite. Reminded her of old songs from her youth. The blue was the wiser. Never preened for anyone but her. The morning her old man stayed gone, she went ahead and fixed the glass. From his time gone, four days followed with what could be, had the heavens heard her wish. When the detectives came in to tell her the news, she had two words for them: You sure? They glanced at each other, and one of them asked her to come down with them to identify the body, to sit for questioning. She looked at the birds. A tear broke loose over its edge. Once and big. Long crawl down. Inside the tear, the years of it, over. She breathed and looked skyward. Swollen heart. The joy in her. The detectives stared at each other. After she had viewed the corpse, grey room, two-way glass. Never a suspect, but her relief at the news caused intrigue in the lead detective he had not felt in years. Heartbeat aside, he needed a recorded statement. He set the coffee in front of her. Before he hit record he had squeezed her hand.

“Just protocol, sweetheart.”

The apartment between them, empty. His on the end of the hall. Hers two down on the left. The Sun gone from the city, the last moments of light, gold. A knock. Nobody knocked on their floor. Out of bed, the dream pulled pack, a café blurred. Feet to floor. Eye through the Jeff Stewart 30 doorway. Two men in suits, talking to Aria. Her door open. Her body unseen. The men were sharpened. Linear men. He listened there nude. The detectives, there by word of the bartender. The body was discovered a week after death, they canvassed. Easy work led them to Aria. Her voice from her place. The sound. Satin over chalk. The music. She had nothing for them. She had neither felt him walking behind her nor heard a sound. Blade broken off in his head, teeth kicked out. In that order. They waited for body language. Aria, stared through them. She asked them how the landlord was holding up, and nothing more. They left, locked out. A beat of three on down, and the shower turned on.

At the counter, she watched them leave the lift. Across the lobby. The lead told her they were still working the case, but after this much time, absence of outside prints, and the fact nobody in the area knew anything, to have no expected miracles. She smiled at him. This one was plenty. Done with the floor upstairs. The face and body behind the door up there. The ink behind her robe. The hardness of the widow facing him. He gave her a smile, loose. He left with his partner.

Night in the city had swallowed day and any trace of the case. The city kept him busy for its own reasons.

The old man was prepared for nothing, and he remained that way. What he wanted from the city was easy, a blank space from which to breathe. On his bed in the dirt, when the city called to him it was nature now. Servitude, hungry. Involuntary. Never enough love from the skyline, from the base of his fathers looking down on him. When the night covered the city, the old man could even see the tops of the buildings bent down, slight, glass eyes watching his blood.

—Four nights back, a long thought up into the stars, he had been pulled to his feet. A degenerate moved west down the boulevard to pluck their flower. The old man in dirt, he was a fix for the city. Nothing he would do more. Where the silhouette of the stranger would walk east, across the street moved the beauty of the city, a song of life everyone heard but her. A mass of silhouette following. The old man reached down his side and gripped the handle. When he moved, he moved to hunt. The warm voices in his head, what was needed, and what he would give.

Unlimited love:

Leave the blade inside, son. Take his teeth for fun.

The kill was not the first, the last, or the slowest. He had done worse to others when the city called him out.

At the counter. The landlady sat, younger. A reverse lift of burden, Schopenhauer. Her old man, dead, the city out there in her consideration. Her birds in tune with her. Well-slept, bellies full. Songs of the streets, audible now. She had tried to feel for him, to feel the loss, any type of semblance to sorrow. It fell dead upon conjure. The wish for him to feel long pain, fear until his end, was the only stone in her faded. Her fridge bulging with health. Skin on the mend. Lotion on her face, lemons to her elbows. Unlimited moonrise, a kind Sun. The faces crossing the lobby almost beautifully. The fridge became full on the afternoon of the letter from the holdings company. A condolence, and praise for her work. She was full management now. All checks would be paid to her name. It arrived with one, made out with an extra month in full. Hers. Signed with a stamp. She sent the post office box a card. A message of grace, of gratitude. She dipped her wedge in honey, sucked it off the end. A slow bite into the meat of the fruit. Life had not been as bright as this dark truth. Age set aside, she could breathe and live like the others did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhSmgRd50d8

Sip slowly and begin to play every emotion; they all make me feel like I'm drowning. Resurface. Another crisis I might once again survive. Tell me about those times you reminded me to hope this one might be different. Something tells me you knew they'd say all the same. I'm smiling and wondering whether I have anything worth complaining about. I enjoy the weird turns and roundabouts wherever I'm trekking.

I know that's not just me thinking this sort of thing. How? Because they are sitting right in front of me, appointments and random happenings, individuals are so revealing. I love the authenticity, and I'm intoxicated by our intrigue for others, our longing to connect with something, and how we find ourselves in the most unfamiliar yet comfortable places. That's the only thing these days that makes sense to me. I crave it indefinitely. I've grown thirsty.

"It's complicated," I keep reiterating; eventually, this will all make sense. I keep saying, "it's all meant to be; the here and now is all it can be...and I will follow in that same simplicity." It feels like my morning and evening mantra. I mean it when I say it was something I kept REPEATING. How complicated I am is also what I kept celebrating in my head because I loved the moon as much as I did the stars.

I should stop seeing myself in similies and metaphors because of these words I am not. However, the moon and I may share the story of having many stages and different sides. But what I feel are these here and now. Like the moon's phases, these emotions are authentic and sometimes hard to recognize. But with them, I keep evolving, allowing something within me to continue changing, to embrace any atmosphere around me; I'll be a reminder of the impact the environment which I wish to protect can genuinely impact me.

Love is like this. So beautiful and magnetic, yet expansive, we fear it for our simplicity of being able to hold it. We crave it and want to own it. Yet the very thing that makes it so valuable is that it bears no price, given freely, it's worth way more than gold, and we'd all sacrifice our youth to know it, honestly. That may be the only message I wish to leave with those left on this earth after my own time. Love is the only path to autonomy and happiness. For yourself and others is the only secret or fountain to drink from, love always and indefinitely.

Time goes like this, quick as a star shooting through the sky. In the blink of an eye, all that you've been waiting for and gone before you realized it was all that it needed to be. Keep reaching, keep hoping, like is a wish and hope we leave in the night sky.

#lipplocked #30something #lifelessons