[phoenixheartsongrising]

Starstruck dreams flicker to life

as she is held in captive sway

by the tides dancing in the oceans of his eyes.

For when the storms of lust and love roil within his gaze

a quaking shiver slides down her weary soul

lighting a signal fire,

burning ever brighter,

within every space the shivers race.

Does he know the power twinned within him as he

opens portals to the dreams that echo faintly in the quietest hollows of her soul.

Rooms filled with once radiant hopes

left to decay within the dusty disappointments of choices made and days long past.

Her mind wanders as the crackling love he feeds

sweeps through her day by day

silently lighting homefires within long boarded up hearths of her heart.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

I’m the girl men fall in love with the idea of. They catch glimpses of parts of me and think They know the rest hidden beneath the surface;

The golden girl with the flaming heart. The playful exuberance too world weary by far. The nighttime temptress down on her knees. The selfless caretaker too kind to believe. The warrior-princess covered in scars The simple girl who still wishes on stars.

They all choose a part of me to worship Setting aside the rest of the puzzle pieces Still looking for a heart to call home Because it’s easier to put me in a box Than to put me together until they find a whole picture.

In the end sparkling bits and baubles of me adorn their memories Until I become the one who got away Which is the reason I never could in the end stay.

I’d rather love the reality that is all of myself Than be put on a pedestal so high up There’re no odds of surviving the fall.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

Inhale, now wait.

Have you ever held your breath,

sat with the weight of your world collapsing your chest,

slowly caving in the plans you’ve woven together from reams of stolen daydreams?

Have you ever reached out and brushed your fingers against skin

touching magic for the first time in your life

and wept as you felt it slip like water from your grasp?

I have caressed the sun and like Icarus scorched wings only learning to truly fly.

I have kissed the face of forever and grieved to my soul at its passing.

I have burned with a thirst deeper than oceans amid deserts of desire

I have been holding my breath so long waiting for time to meet me at hope’s edge that my lungs have forgotten what it’s like to exist without starving

But I will never be able to fully breathe until love’s gravity has wrested life from its predetermined course.

Someday I will exhale and the waiting will come to an end.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

Freedom whistles

Wicked little whispers on the wind

Blissfully beckoning her ever near.

Does it dance when she exhales

Or is that the shimmering of her own delight

As nuanced possibilities along her skin alight.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

For how countless are the times I have clenched my teeth

my fingers curled into my palms tearing crescents 

in honor of the moon that has held so many of my dreams in her reflections

even as I could feel them being ripped from the hollows of my heart, 

bloody trails of hopes swimming behind my eyes, 

and felt the vibration of tears reverberating through my jaw

as I kept the imploding collapse of my world from eking out.

I have contained the sorrows as I pulled myself 

from the ashes and rubble each time I have started over

and heard the pain, howling in despair, rip through me

begging to bleed out the last of the hope burning bright

and allow us to be consumed by the darknesses that none but I see.

Insidiously sweet, they creep slowly along my spine

Whispering softly in my ear, lullabies of surrender

effigies of the women I have been dangling before me 

a kaleidoscope of 

fears  laughter  emptiness  love  regret

a brokenness so profound it claws at my chest

sings siren songs to a mind barely hanging on

always hungry, always pushing, 

relentless

exhausting the last of me I have willed to be strong. 

But in the end 

I’d rather let the monsters inside me break all of my bones

before I let them get near you.

…and so I hold on. 

——————————————————

My sign in this poem by @teaspirationss spoke to me deeply and I had to follow where it led. The lines in italiacs are wholly hers. 

[phoenixheartsongrising]

What is forever but a word,

A fanciful falsehood spun from a fairytale

A figment of a dream that does not exist let alone can come true

Forever is a promise we speak from fickle hearts

Knowing it will inevitably be broken and us along with it.

And yet we still yearn for a loophole

Hope against all reason that this time,

Someday

Somehow

The farce of forever will become the force of our salvation

Instead of the face worn by the forgotten dreams once fashioned by our foolish hearts.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

Tonight the halls of yesterday come calling

Whispers layered on the crisp night air

Ghosts adding to the cacaphony of silence

That pierces these weary walls.

So many names and faces

Endless hopes and someday wishes

Joy racing recklessly off cliffs carved from heartache

Dancing under a moon shining bright with dreams that never come to be.

Oh how they tug and caress,

Causing my soul to shake and tremble,

Decimate what things remain and bring my mind to its knees.

These once upon a forgotten time

Mishappenly realized

Long ago discarded

Loves scattered to the winds of memories.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

There is an unbearable weight to the past that clings like a second skin,

Slithering into the corners of your mind to whisper its insidious, saccharine lies.

Within the quiet moments where your deepest wish is simply to survive another night

It is both the faint but fond warmth that we cling to like safety blankets against the monsters behind closed eyes

And the bringer of nightmares that dance in to form of every lover and friend left behind.

In the moments where you breathe a sigh of relief to have finally outrun the demon that can never be left behind

Ever so softly it runs its fingers along the catalogue of each memory you’ve ever had

Searching for that one nerve

The one moment

Which has the power to shatter the fragile shield we build around our hearts

And it watches while our world burns down around us again.

It is never enough for the past to have taken our dreams

To steal the hopes once burning ever brighter

No,

It must tempt and torment the present until we live within the padded walls of our own minds

Silently screaming behind the masks we wear in the day as we pretend that everything will be okay.

What has been will always be the lover that will never leave your bed

The melody forever stuck on a loop within your head

Driving you ever closer to the madness of slipping the last foot over the edge.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

If I am more alive than the rest...

Is this why my soul sucks itself in and turns inside out with grief

Or why every nerve in my body sings songs ancient and bright as it crashes and tangles with lovers delight

And when I am small, broken inside so deeply that my teeth cannot stem the wails beyond sorrow that tear from my lips unbidden

Does this give shape to the amorphous, voice to the void, breath to the intangible drowning I find myself gasping to tread each and every day

If gravity pulls towards a focal point then why when the orbit is done do I still stand alone, pushing away from everyone I thought to love like the polar end of a magnet

If gravity is me and I am my own, if I feel so deeply there are days I very nearly split at the seams, if I love with such abandon that it burns out even as I yearn for more, if I am more alive then why this seething, aching, lonely, wondering vacuum inside.

Am I a black hole masquerading as sunlight?

[phoenixheartsongrising]

I am the sum of my scars My demons My battlefield victories paid for with blood, sweat and tears. I am the end of night When hopes become fears Walking in the dark. I am the reckoning at dawn The last to back down The last to give ground. I am covered in writhing ink The emotions that consume me Sprawled across my skin for all to read. I am etched with the knowing of heartache Deep into the marrow of my bones And yet I will not surrender to the hopeless whispers crowding inside my head. I am the harmony in the storm The thunder calling the lightning home Dancing across the desert in naked need. I am chaos burning through the world Unsure of the fire in my blood Against the cooling ache remembrance brings. I am fury given flight On broken wings of ill fated dreams Wheeling against the current of here and now. I am the sleeping giant Quiet in the moments before all hell Becomes the impetus of my waking nightmare. I am ocean depths Unable to be charted or tamed Mercurial in the best of tides Dragging you further into me even as you search my kisses For the oxygen you need to breathe. Do not mistake the quiet winds of tenderness Shifting through this war torn heart For points of entry When you have yet to scale the walls encasing what is left of me. Do not miss the tempest in my eyes When you search for your future Within their green-gold gaze. Most of all do not forget that I am a goddess Stripped of all but what I make my own I will carry the spark within my heart Until my world is set ablaze with the fires of recovery.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

You took the moon and the stars

And quietly offered them a place in me once again

When in the softness of an ordinary moment

You ran your fingers unprovoked through my hair

Then deep into my soul.

You shook the foundations of my understanding

As you took the bounds of intimacy and with me

Stretched them into this beautifully all encompassing web

Of happiness, quiet moments, true satisfaction, vulnerability and continual fulfillment.

You do not know that you teach me daily, often hourly

That what has been is not what must be

You show me what it means to learn together,

Grow together, find strength and edification in one another

Through small, seemingly innocuous conversations and actions

Which when intertwined the way we do

Continue to envelop us with a warmth and depth I cannot describe.

Yet it pulls me deeper

Calls me home

Binds me to you

Lights a new kind of fire in my chest.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

This brain expands and contracts

Spirals unto itself as quickly as it opens wide

Sucking everything in its wake into the gaping void

Anxiety proffers for the taking.

My skin stretches and heart fragments

Each straining to contain the galaxies of feelings

Threatening to rip apart my seams with the very fibers that make me me.

I do not know how to tell you that the stars in my eyes that glow bright in the day

Shimmer with unbidden tears in the night

Or that the joy that bounces off my smile as I laugh

Turns so cold and brittle when that same smile melts from the contours of my face.

How can I explain that some days these highs have no rhythm

And the lows all seem to rhyme

Drawing all together into helpless poetry

A wellspring of emptiness I can neither contain nor fill within myself.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

If I am more alive than the rest...

Is this why my soul sucks itself in and turns inside out with grief

Or why every nerve in my body sings songs ancient and bright as it crashes and tangles with lovers delight

And when I am small, broken inside so deeply that my teeth cannot stem the wails beyond sorrow that tear from my lips unbidden

Does this give shape to the amorphous, voice to the void, breath to the intangible drowning I find myself gasping to tread each and every day

If gravity pulls towards a focal point then why when the orbit is done do I still stand alone, pushing away from everyone I thought to love like the polar end of a magnet

If gravity is me and I am my own, if I feel so deeply there are days I very nearly split at the seams, if I love with such abandon that it burns out even as I yearn for more, if I am more alive then why this seething, aching, lonely, wondering vacuum inside.

Am I a black hole masquerading as sunlight?

[phoenixheartsongrising]

No one ever teaches you that contentment and the desire to stop existing can live within the same brain space

That loneliness and peace bringing solitude share the same razor sharp edge you can’t quite seem to balance on

You are taught that you can do or be anything until you wander out into the world where you learn that those concepts are built to make you a motivated cog in an endless machine without actually giving you wings

How do you pull yourself up from drowning under expectations so long standing that you are unsure where they began let alone how to reconfigure your brain to no longer judge everything by them?

When can you break a cycle that by sheer definitive proof of change should dictate an alternate ending, yet here you are at the same crossroads, a little older and a little wiser yet never moving forward?

And why, why oh fucking why, do we put so much effort into thriving when the name of this game is truly only ever survival?

[phoenixheartsongrising]

I cannot take the path stretching behind

For while familiarity is comfortable

It will just as quickly burn me to the ground

Even as I breathe a sigh of relief

As I settle into its arms.

But I cannot see the path ahead either.

I take two steps to watch it disappear before me

Twisting into a forest of unknowns

The bird calls of dreams that can’t be

Dragging me to and fro

Until I am lost within my own mind

Unable to find a compass or way to light my journey.

So I will sit here in the raucous silence

Struggling to breathe

Until I can see the solution to this maze of emotions

Tugging at me from every side.

[phoenixheartsongrising]

For how countless are the times I have clenched my teeth

my fingers curled into my palms tearing crescents 

in honor of the moon that has held so many of my dreams in her reflections

even as I could feel them being ripped from the hollows of my heart, 

bloody trails of hopes swimming behind my eyes, 

and felt the vibration of tears reverberating through my jaw

as I kept the imploding collapse of my world from eking out.

I have contained the sorrows as I pulled myself 

from the ashes and rubble each time I have started over

and heard the pain, howling in despair, rip through me

begging to bleed out the last of the hope burning bright

and allow us to be consumed by the darknesses that none but I see.

Insidiously sweet, they creep slowly along my spine

Whispering softly in my ear, lullabies of surrender

effigies of the women I have been dangling before me 

a kaleidoscope of 

fears  laughter  emptiness  love  regret

a brokenness so profound it claws at my chest

sings siren songs to a mind barely hanging on

always hungry, always pushing, 

relentless

exhausting the last of me I have willed to be strong. 

But in the end 

I’d rather let the monsters inside me break all of my bones

before I let them get near you.

...and so I hold on. 

------------------------------------------------------

My sign in this poem by @teaspirationss spoke to me deeply and I had to follow where it led. The lines in italiacs are wholly hers. 

[phoenixheartsongrising]

Oh sweet @definegodliness trying to get me interacting in the Tumblr-sphere again. <3

Last Song: I’ll Be Ok by Ballyhoo and Snow White by Highly Suspect

Last Movie: Cinderella staring Brandy and Whitney Houston because I needed a hit of nostalgia to the feels.

Currently Watching: Prodigal Son. I’m a sucker for serial killer stories and Michael Sheen.

Currently Reading: Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore to jog my memory so I can read her newest novel in a world I love but haven’t explored in too many years.

Currently Craving: The hopefire I once had burning in my chest to reignite.

Currently Playing: Trine with my son. I’m utterly useless most of the time but we laugh until our sides hurt and I wouldn’t trade the time together for the world.

Tagging my lovelies @notazoo and @torrentialmonsoon as well as the wonderful @greywoodpoetry