They say in life you gotta deal with the hand you're delt with Maybe I got a bad hand but I have this pen To conjure up words with to speak soft sentiments and phrases to warm your fabric stained heart wrapped in a blanket just so you can keep warm on winter nights To make your bones shiver and quake at the evocation of emotion that slowly binds you like vines on the highest bough on the tree of life I have this fear of living my life Being afraid of anything or anyone that moves near me in a cowardly process of masochism and self defeating prophecies and to keep my past from creeping under my skin And to raise my state of mind up from the bedrock I walk on every day to be put up on display like a statue that is molded by steel and stands tall through icy winters and blistering summers Take away my hedonistic patterns of behavior that have molded my person into self righteous rants on how my way is best Trying to realize how empathy works and being less sure about people, but to love them unconditionally through their flaws and imperfections that my love will encapsulate through the pores on their face My love will drown all those who sink and shatter under the weight of my heavy heart Time to jump in, sink or swim Let my demons and ghosts creep up through the floorboards of my house to remind me of all the mistakes I made and people I wronged and who I loved and lost Not to ever forget them and to keep them where I hold my secrets I'll wrap barbed wire around my heart so no one dares to touch it The smoke that I inhale acts as a fog that will keep me camouflaged under the cloak of my insecurities So convoluted to hide all the pity bestowed onto me during my years as a teen My naive mind goes in binds and intertwines with the fabric of your veins that hold our blood type I am a tragic hero that has failed to keep his self worth on track Fallen from my pride and ego that shatters like a vase on accident by a 3 year old with a ball But I tell you all this Failing is for all of us Not just for a select few Let us learn the ways of our mistakes and mold them to the cracks on the pavement Let our bodies fail and tell our last story with our last breath only to go through another door and kiss the ones you love Meet the heavens and greet the past lives you were meant to meet Shake hands with God and remember that love will bring you back home And as the curtains close on our lives and closure wraps around our rib cages I won't be sad that you will be leaving because I know you'll smile back at me one day when my legs grow numb and my lips stain the purity of language for the last time And right now I'm no longer afraid of death Proud as I am I still love you I always will.

You are reborn and even though I barely have known you and probably will never will I am prouder of how far you’ve come than some of the closest people that stand around me You show yourself as who you are, no one can take that away from you Arms stretched out, trying to catch what you thought was the wind was actually the sky and you hold yourself, now, stronger after the ball and chain is slowly disappearing from your heart and you are morphing into someone that you can truly believe in I stand here, wishing I posses the strength you have, only to come up short and be tied down by the anchors and constraints of life But I also understand, you are finally free to become the person you want to be and all I can see is true happiness, something I hope to attain one day The biggest regret that I can speak out of my mouth to make vibrations so you can hear pure truth, is that, I really wish I took the time to know you But life is pulling on our strings and watches as the world turns and pulls us apart But I will always keep the strength of your inner being in my heart to make myself grow out of the molds and to make ourselves blossom to something more than we could ever know I don’t consider you to be me, nor would I ever because your struggles aren’t mine and I hate to intertwine the binds that you’ve broken and ripped apart when you struggle to keep the vines off of you Because I’ve known the world has abused you, yet you stand tall, look me right in the eye and will one day tell the person you love most, “I do” And all of this, even when I leave you, I will still keep you in the back of my mind, on the city streets, where I will meet and greet more people like you and share the story that I know of you, because what can I do but share the strength and hope of someone renewed to a fellow human being who deserves the same empathy as a person such as me Some people will never know the old you, and knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, and I hope you won’t ever have to explain how you’ve change and how its normal and no one is to blame, THIS IS HOW YOU ARE and I will stand beside you even if you need me or not, I will be a soldier on the front lines protecting the scars and damage that been caused for the name of humanity, and I’m no hero, just a decent human being trying to give a little bit of spare change to someone who will actually use it So take my hand, brother and count with me the weeks and time that passes by us like strangers on a New York City sidewalk and we’ll become one with veins connected and blood type the same All we can ignore the hate spewed from biased tongues and protect our love ones from shying lungs and to finally pontificate the meaning of being human in ourselves and what are we more than a bunch of water and vacuous cells WE ARE PEOPLE, contrived to be more than just another empty soul, WE LOVE EACH OTHER MORE THAN WE COULD EVER KNOW AND WE UNDERSTAND THE NEEDS AND STRUGGLES OF OTHERS AS WE STAND WITH OUR SISTERS AND BROTHERS AND WE MAKE MORE OF HOME THAN JUST A SHELTER WE MAKE IT A SAFE SPACE FOR ONE ANOTHER AND ALL WE CAN DO IS SHARE THE LAUGHS AND MEMORIES BEFORE WE CRUMBLE INTO THE GROUND LIKE THE DIRT WE CAME FROM AND CHANT TO THE RHYTHM OF LIFE UNTIL THE BREATH OF LIFE LEAVES OUR SOULS

As our time ends and friendships wistfully fade away like sand in an hourglass We realize we’ll be forgotten Replace like buried in the soil to never be dug up again And we will move on with our lives And so it goes Kurt Vonnegut says, as the temporary idea of life sinks into our souls never to be outgrown, only to become more bold as age climbs up the ladder of numbers My heart is still beating for you and even though I cannot prove it, I can convolute it to slip into your subconscious mind as I bind myself to memories I cannot longer recreate Wearing your hopes and dreams on my sleeve where you’ll finally realize that your goals in life were just illusions to keep you from that the best things in life will never be freed As I’m locked into my own subconscious, I believe that love is out of our reach and you realize we will never see each other again To be fully honest, I’m more than happy to leave you behind and all I really want from you is to shine bright from above and to be a beacon of home from when troubled nights ahead of me make me weary Streetlights will guide my way back home, wherever that is, and put me somewhere where I can truly believe in myself If I catch another second with you I’ll take these stars out of the sky and place them into my hand and juggle the cosmos trying to make you laugh as I always do Broken hearts will be speed bumps on the road and you will show your scars to future lovers and beggars by glass shards Suburban households that are created out of cookie cutter molds will craft my finest art as cityscapes haunt my thoughts as I try to see whether not I can be the man I was once Drowning an ocean of web based thinking and countless cigarettes as Neptune’s winds emulate the water that fills my lungs And when I die my last thoughts will be of you Not knowing where you are or who’ve you become but comforted at least that I have a lasting thought that will pervade me

You were a poem written at 1 in the morning When I’d laid there by my bedside Begging for some relief But I’m going to let that poem die inside like I let the love that ran through my veins for you die Because I could not admit I was in love with a lie You weren’t the lie, but I lied to myself Thinking you we’re going to save me But then I realized nothing was going to save me and I don’t deserved to be saved, anyway I know I was wrong in idealizing you, but you were my first And I was vulnerable and didn’t know what to do Hindsight is 20/20 and I was a moth and you we’re a light driving me back home When I watched that light flicker out in front of me The opportunity gave way to great mystery You knew what exactly was going on with me but you could never articulate it with vibrations so strong they could have rocked bridge cables The seismographs’ reading would come back from my heart They’d see the earthquake split it apart The damage was irreversible, time is our only ally So I let you slip between my fingers like sand To let you go back to the ocean And find someone else again But the irony of this whole poem is It’s one in the morning and this dying poem Is finally getting relief by my bedside.