It's funny what insignificant details stick out from my childhood.
I can remember the neighbor kid's laugh,
the entirety of a book minus the title, and the foul flavor of the Flintstones vitamins that were force fed to me.
Yet the details I want to remember have been lost throughout the years.
I can no longer recall the exact model of my parent's gray car, when I lost my slightly yellow front tooth, or the address of the blue house that I spent my first years in.
It seems that I have lost those details.
It seems that I have forgotten everything except what I had expected to forget.
Tag: Me
Found
There are thousands of variations to each situation I've placed myself within.
Each moment I've experienced could have been changed and every encounter slightly altered. Yet, I do believe that each and every outcome would have inevitably led me to you.
Somehow I still would have found you.
The Hedge
It's getting harder to notice where you hit the hedge with your car.
It took a few years, but it's branches are beginning to burst and bloom.
It's sharp pine needles finally flourishing and filling in the gaps that your hood had left.
Now even the scarred foliage seems to be smirking at what you did.
It's triumph much more than just another act of nature.
Babel
I realized that I had flipped through an entire chapter without retaining any words.
My eyes had scanned each line of thirteen full pages without actually reading a single letter.
Thirteen.
I apparently had no desire to try to comprehend anything besides the blur of babel in my mind.
So I closed the book with a sigh.
Unreliable
I'm an unreliable narrator.
My stories are missing timelines and their details have been diluted by either drugs or depression.
Although that's probably for the best.
Why repeat what I'm urged to remember,
but compelled to forget?
Him
One night split my life
into two separate eras.
Before him and after him.
Guilt
Guilt is an awful gnawing thing that relentlessly eats at you.
And mine had become a painfully persistent parasite, rapidly growing as it fed off of my secrets and shame.
Devouring my lies almost as quickly
as my lies were devouring me.
Twice
I don't want to write pretty words.
I don't want to write words that are read once and left to sit politely on a shelf.
I don't want to write about the sky and the birds and the flowers that are just too pristine and perfect to be plucked.
I want to release the madness from my head.
I want my pain, my fears, and my ugliness to exist as words so beautiful that they earn their right to be read twice.
Alive
My birth certificate has an error.
My life truly started nearly thirty years after the date that was printed on that paper.
It took almost three full decades to finally feel alive and all I had to do was accept myself.
All I had to do was stop lying.
Still
He knows everything
and he still loves me.
He knows everything
and he is still here.
AO Poetry 
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