“The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.”

“The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.”

“The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.”

“Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,And soup,And peanut butter cookies,Though, the truth is peanutbutter is actually really bad for you 'cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you!”

“I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm cuz I'd rather be left for dead than wondering what thunder sounds like.”

“Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.”

“..when a war ends, what does that look like exactly?do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves?does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother?when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glassand our reflection is not something we can stand to look atdoes the white flag make for a perfect blindfold?yesterday i was told a storyabout this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old,who cannot fall asleepbecause when she doesshe dreams of nothingbut the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse.if you told her war is overdo you think she can sleep?”

“I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with.Tell me why you loved them,then tell me why they loved you. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling good.I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling bad.I wanna know the first person who taught you your beautycould ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass.See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living.I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving,and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes.I wanna know if you bleed sometimesfrom other people’s wounds,and if you dream sometimesthat this life is just a balloon —that if you wanted to, you could pop,but you never would‘cause you’d never want it to stop.If a tree fell in the forestand you were the only one there to hear —if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound,would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist,or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness?”

“A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.”

“Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion, or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain?”

“Safety isn't always safe. You can find one on every gun.”

“We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night...”