“We May Think That We Fully Control Ourselves. However, A Friend Can Easily Reveal Something About

keep it close to your heart

keep it close to your heart give me a half glance when you pass don't dare whisper grin as my pulse thuds twice as fast don't set yourself apart. twitch my fingers in a wave keep it all in your chest oh your smile; I won't be the same. but spend every waking moment wondering what you think of watching with bated breath. wondering if I grace your daydreams. keep it all in your mind let loose that hope, smile and wave a promise, treading your tightrope. don't talk; be kind... soft mockery and fluttering sighs. keep it all close to me a thousand quiet hopes and another reason why be those butterflies I want to set free. hold those thoughts; let my heart skip a sweeping dawn, a bargain to rescind to a melody I can't let persist. a hundred damned flowers thrown to the wind save myself from finding closure the brush of fingers, clench your dreams into my fists, a warm autumn night, keep your whispers by my chest, the meeting of eyes, as I find my way closer a smile of delight. this broken compass that points West. keep me close to your heart, & listen: none of those letters were ever a lie & I'll keep you, with all my might. I loved you first. but I'll be the first to say goodbye.

You can’t live for someone else. At some point you just explode.

Matthew Quick

“I write to find out what I’m thinking.”

— Julia Alvarez

Safia Elhillo, from Home Is Not a Country; “Boys”

Bianca Stone, from What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems; “Cutting Odette’s Fingernails”

“The truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.”

— Stephen King

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

— Cormac McCarthy

i.

the end of the day like the last stop of a train, the sun too  is on its way out of sight,

past the horizon with its  dusk and all the stars.

ii.

tomorrow is a window onto hope, growing like a flower in soil gently tilled,

like the way you are gentle flow  and ebb, between here and now, there and soon… and in between 

the pages tucked, feather light  the mark you booked — through all the cracks, 

the shimmering edge of everything  disappearing into this… a halo  of softness, what is an angel anyway 

but a disguise… for all the places  you didn’t look, some being  holds the torch quietly… when you don’t. 

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.

Howard Thurman

“The things I find most beautiful about a person are almost never physical.”

— Mark Patterson