Everyone's lying
But nobody is listening,
Coins glimmer and shine;

The truth still glistens
At dawn over crop fields,
Sunlit canopies.

Nature prevails
To show us our failures,
Yet, mankind squabbles.

The death toll rises
And nothing ever changes;
We don't have the time.

Keep spinning the wheel,
The sunset brings shade.

we all make the main characters
in the stories we write
have blue eyes
if ours are green
brown eyes
if ours are blue
and hazel
if they're grey

just so that
no one can tell

whose secrets
line the pages
in our favourite font

Deeming that I were better dead,
"How shall I **** myself?" I said.
Thus mooning by the river Seine
I sought extinction without pain,
When on a bridge I saw a flash
Of lingerie and heard a splash . . .
So as I am a swimmer stout
I plunged and pulled the poor wretch out.

The female that I saved? Ah yes,
To yield the Morgue of one corpse the less,
Apart from all heroic action,
Gave me a moral satisfaction.
was she an old and withered hag,
Too tired of life to long to lag?
Ah no, she was so young and fair
I fell in love with her right there.

And when she took me to her attic
Her gratitude was most emphatic.
A sweet and simple girl she proved,
Distraught because the man she loved
In battle his life-blood had shed . . .
So I, too, told her of my dead,
The girl who in a garret grey
Had coughed and coughed her life away.

Thus as we sought our griefs to smother,
With kisses we consoled each other . . .
And there's the ending of my story;
It wasn't grim, it wasn't gory.
For comforted were hearts forlorn,
And from black sorrow joy was born:
So may our dead dears be forgiving,
And bless the rapture of the living.

I know what you're feeling
cause I feel it too.
You're very sad inside
but no one has a clue.

You think that you're worthless,
can't do anything right;
but you make the lives
of your friends so bright.

You think no one loves you,
well think again.
Our God surely loves you;
He made you like a precious gem.

All your problems, trials, and all that you feel,
are part of the path to your dreams becoming real.

He made you beautiful,
Inside and out.
You're perfect to Him;
so don't you pout.

Like a flower waiting to bloom,
Your talents will fully come out soon.
Like Armstrong going to the moon,
when you get there, the world will go boom.

i don’t want to be someone who writes in pencil
and eats too slowly and walks with eyes that
are glued to the sidewalk and tops of strangers’ feet
i’ve been underwater for so long that
i’ve forgotten lungs are meant
to be filled with air; exhaling seems
more like something found
on the second star to the right, rather
than a process that is meant to be
done twenty-three thousand times a day

i feel like an old woman who
looks in the mirror and all she can see
are wrinkles and white hair and tired eyes and
the absence of who she used to be

but i am not someone who turns away
from sunsets and pretends
that darkness is all i’ve ever known;
someone who thinks
the sun will never rise again

because the sun will rise again—
the words hiding inside of me will
find their way out, because
i cannot hold my breath forever

i am not someone who writes in pencil
and erases the bits that are too
honest and too imperfect and too real
to claim as thoughts of my own

i cannot keep my lips pursed and
hands tied behind my back,
i cannot keep pretending i am
a shadow of who i used to be

my tomorrows hold suns much
brighter than ones that have risen
over horizons of my past;
i have not reached the summit yet

there is so much more me
for me to become

each day, i am new.