I see how people have to be bruised and empty in places.
For every person there is a lost and lonely side,
a place in life where nothing is alive, but only passing shadows of faded blues and browns.

Belief is lost in the words.
Words, words, words that allow no space for dreams but crowd with unrelenting syllables through paragraphs we desperately try to form, to finish, to make sense of the words that come out like tides of blackbirds, black after black after.

So many people cut off their voices like they are a permanent disease,
some deformity.
In swallowing these words we cannot write, we spit out lies,
and disbelieve the truth.
Because the truth is that we are afraid of who we are.
There is comfort in self-hate, in allowing mirrors to define our beauty,
as though a two-dimensional reflection could do justice to a piece of literature.

Sometime the decision was made
that there is too much power in knowing our own beauty,
in covering our bodies with it like an oil,
in walking into a room and having everyone fall silent.

I am so sorry we are blind to the words our bodies form together,
the rightness in the meaning behind our stares.

I feel the missing pieces in you and I know that they cannot penetrate too deep,
Because if you begin to look participation is effortless.
When you speak my language you will not dismiss beauty for arrogance,
or mistake glamour for beauty.
For glamour has a hard, metallic edge, while beauty sinks deep and draws us into a well
of which no one has ever robbed the bottom of gold.

I am dying to read you as the story you are,
dying to tell you how beautiful you are,
that I will fall silent when you look at me.
The conquest of our hearts is a biography of beauty.

Nothing lost and nothing lost,
when form is formless we will cry
and the blackbirds will rise from this land
like a wind on the faces of the crowd.