"How tall am I?" I asked him.

Life appraised me, two knowing eyes and a dry lip, and then he said, "Compared to the universe, you are a countless light years from being tall. In the eye of the stars, you are no more than a wisp of flame. If the earth were to answer, she'd say you're a stunted shrub with a pair of blackberries for eyes. But for an ant, you are a giant."

I laughed at what he said, thinking he was joking. "Well, that sounded great and all, but how tall am I really?"

He laughed back so casually, "Boy, you're only as tall as you think you are!"

I look out into the beautiful skyline

Purely dreaming…

How can somebody like me make it out of the gutter?

It’s like chains putting a strain on my pursuit to happiness

The chains that bound me to my unforgettable past

The past that once drowned me in my darkest sorrows

It haunts me daily…

Not just at night

Who would’ve know this life would be this hard?

I didn’t choose this life, it chose me

So tell me, what do i do with the cards that was dealt to me?

Meaningless conversations and friendships only confirms my self-doubt that i’ll never find the answer…

#freeVersePoetry #poetry

Life the ocean

waves crashing endlessly

peaks and troughs

interchangeable.

Swim in the shallows

fighting the rip tides

and you suspend yourself in struggle.

But you learn

with time

to use life’s magnificent force

swimming out to the quiet ocean

away from shore

picking a wave

falling

taking on water

but there is always another wave to come.

You learn and hone your ability

to pick your wave

and mount it with confidence

riding it in the sunshine

letting it take you

effortlessly

home.

We live everyday stressing about what happened yesterday and what tomorrow might bring us. When in reality, the only way to really live is to focus on the now. If we are always stressing about the future or the past, how can we do that at all? One major thing I have come to learn is that everyone is caught up in something. One particular thing...., and that thing is, Time. Every one of us celebrates, loves, cries, laughs, loses someone we love. In the end, everything good and bad comes from Time. We celebrate another year alive. We cry because our loved one’s time has come to an end. We have the greatest day of our entire life’s, but it is over before we know it. The world is always spinning and the clock is always ticking, and we have to live our lifes the best we can.

Life has taught me that one year from now,

if I am lucky enough to be alive,

I will not remember the long line at the grocery store

or getting stuck in traffic on 495

Life has taught me that if I wallow in self pity

I am living regretfully with blind disregard of the present moment

People will do and say hurtful things

I have the choice to buy into it or move on

Life has taught me that if I don’t love myself

No one else will

And that beauty is skin deep

And in the eye of the beholder

Life has taught me that we are here one day

And gone the next,

And it’s not really about what happens in between,

It’s about how we react to the good, the bad, the ugly

No matter where you go, there you are. Most of the time. Unless you spend a lot of time out of your mind, like I do. Then, I don’t know where you are. But, then again, neither do you…

No one gets out alive. Unless they are standing in the Emergency Aisle.

No, it's not a dress rehearsal. Ok, sometimes it is. You better do well, in that case. Or your Mother will hate you. Forever.

No one cares about you more than you. Ask your mirror. (It lies).

Nothing is out there except the truth.

No one can take the sky from me, even if they burn the land and boil the sea. I mean, it’s the fucking sky, right?

No, I’m not crazy; I am differently-abled.

No, I am not interested in your bullshit. I have enough of my own to last a lifetime. A blowjob, however? Sure.

I have learned many things in my existence so far, but three lessons have stuck out to me the most. First thing: People can be unkind. Being the scrawny little nobody that was homeschooled until ninth grade taught me that. But being bullied through high school taught me my second thing: work hard. By working hard at sixteen I was able to graduate high school. By working harder, I put myself through my first two years of school debt free and received my Associates degree by eighteen. Only to work even harder, by the age of twenty, to receive my Bachelor’s degree in English. While the past few years haven’t been easy with the loads of school, working multiple jobs, and countless exhausting battles with my depression and anxiety leads me to my third most important lesson learned. God will provide.

I know that’s nothing new or shocking, but I feel the grit of that sentence intensifies the older you get, and you learn this same lesson over and over. The only hitch is that “not fair” slowly takes on more mature meanings.

It is no longer that someone cut in front of you in line, but that liars and cheaters actually succeed quite swimmingly in this world.

It is no longer that a slacker ruined everyone’s group project grade, but that one person, one slip up, can ruin a company.

It is no longer that you broke your arm and missed the rest of the baseball season, but that people die, and there are more important things they will miss.

Not one ever told me that life was fair. But no one ever told me, laying on the wood chipped ground, that it was only going to get harder.