t-writes-poems

1. You are a tangle of past lives and defense mechanisms. Breathe. 2. When your grandfather says you have lightning in your hair and in your heart, those are not words of condemnation – they are a quiet battle cry for the warrior to be. He will forget these things in time, but you will not. 3. Every time a man comes close enough to touch you, you will question what it means to love and be loved by a lover and what it means to be a mother, because what you’ve seen could never serve as an adequate cookie cutter. Growing up and growing out from your soiled roots will not be easy, but listen to the words of God when He tells you, &l

our sour self-made gospel has left us to scrape our worth from the spaces between our bones. and maybe i know more than most of how the mind can become so muddied by makeshift metaphors and senseless semicolons, lowercase love and worthless words. but i have chosen a champion over second chances, triumph over trial, selfless psalms over selfish songs, and He has made me new.

i shouldn't apologize, but i'm sorry that i taste so much of sandpaper and saltwater. most of my kisses up to this point have been tied up and weighed down by pale promises and outdated alcohol. i've spent months stuffing mirrors into my stomach to see who i am beneath my skin and become a reflection of her instead of him. i am moving on and my love for him is gone, but there are days that i awaken shaken by processions of nightmares, and under my breath i swear they're there because he doesn't whisper "sweet dreams" in my ear anymore. i'm not asking you to fix me. i'm just asking you to maybe hold my hands steady as i sew up these se

when the storm comes thundering in, the wind scraping its claws over your skin, howling the payment for your mortal sins, i hope the lightning misses every time a bolt flashes because you deserve to see that nobody but me can start a fire that burns you to ashes.

there is a certain time of night that every song on the static radio makes me cry, and i want to break my skin and pull you back in again. and it is then and only then that the loveliest memories strangle my lungs, and i remember sobbing into your pillow at 3am because i felt so alone, and you turned out the lights and held me close and hummed “you are my sun- shine” until i could breathe again. and i swear i would be fine if that night could be tonight. but no, here i am, alone and alive, and i don’t have a place in your head or in your bed, so let me share with you instead these lessons i've learned in regret.

I’m on a sinking ship, she says. There are oceans of opportunity out there, they say. But I never learned to swim, she says. And I’m already drowning. She sits cross-legged in the overgrown grass, smoothing her black sundress over her thighs (over and over again) and flicking the ashes off the end of her cigarette (over and over again). They watch her through sideways glances. I don’t smoke, she reassures them, exhaling one last time and grinding the butt of the cigarette into the dirt. They nod and offer her another. Without hesitation, she takes it and lights it up. A long silence follows, chilling the April air. Then

he brushes a kiss across my forehead. “your hair still smells like smoke.” i press my face against his chest. “your heart still smells like ashes.”

the fairytales and lovesongs are lies. because i do not want to fall in love with you like i am falling in love for the first time. i want your hand to fit with mine like they were moulded for each other at the dawn of time, like we've been making footprints side-by-side through the darkness together long before we learned to shine, like we were born from the same oceans and i have been looking to fall in love with exactly you every day since i coughed the seawater from my lungs and began to breathe.

we whisper our prayers in a cathedral of sheets because we do not know how to forgive or be forgiven. confessions are made to a doctor who keeps a record of our wrongs neatly tucked in her files because she knows not love, but money. hospitals become our altars, our "hail mary"s handed to pharmacists in exchange for chemical cleansing of our souls. we do everything, everything to force ourselves to fly, high and higher, forgetting that we have been given the grace of wings. we have chosen to be slaves, to rebind ourselves in our chains. we strive to turn the wine to water, the bread to crumbs. but i tell you the truth. the b