Whenever I sense myself consciously or subconsciously apologizing for who I am, I like to think of the line in Max Ehrmann's Desiderata -- You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

Your will is what makes you amazing. Your atoms are what make you beyond words.

Sometimes I think of you in colors. I paint pictures in my mind as each stroke represents a memory. I never know what I am painting, since you only exist in the colors, now, but I let the blushes come. I let them touch my heart like canvas paper and cover the stains you already left.

This is my emancipation I shall not Shall not Shall fucking not Concede to societal ideologies that tell me Who and what I am is wrong Wrong Wrong For knowing my heart Not my pocketbook Holds all my values that I need to navigate The seas of All my life

He knew if I chose to fly he couldn't keep up, his wings were clipped for now, out of practice, waiting for the day when he could roam again, waiting for the time to come when he could follow the currents of the sky by my side.

She walks through the myths of time. Forwards and backwards in her timeless space. Effortless and without skin and bones. She is being pulled by the past whilst being pushed by envy of the future she.

It would be easier to think that angels are something outside of us, something separate or something entirely made up.

Despite the startling clarity of hindsight, I possess not one ounce of regret, because for the first time in a long time, I listened to the quiet, strong voice of instinct and allowed myself to be taken for the ride.

I'm sure most of us have been betrayed by someone we trusted and thought loved us. The immediate effects of this on us are obvious, the longer lasting -- the haunting ones, not so much.

I left with no money, except a few dollars to fuel the car to the place of respite. I left without any meaningful goodbyes with the one who had been my true love.

Sometimes we have a chance to encounter angelic demons that play around with heartbeats. They exist within and without us, and bring a state of peaceful confusion that leaves you when acknowledging its presence with your unworthy fascinations.

We are all interconnected in a divine matrix known as a space of potentiality.

But all planes land eventually. And some on those planes will be met, and some will not. And for all of those people, there are beginnings and endings and middles and sunsets and wide open moons that fill the cabs of red pickup trucks with a light that just happens to be the color of hope.

Tanya Lee, go get my belt! The very first man I remember to be in my life was not my biological father. I use the word biological here because he, in fact, never took on the dad role with me. He provided an intricate piece for my existence and virtually nothing else. From just an infant, his visits were sporadic, very short and often limited to annual occurrences. What I remember most is that they were full of rage, tension, loud shouting, furniture being pushed over — and spanking. Despite his lack of presence in my life, he did manage to — abandon, reject, whoop, spank, berate, ignore and once kidnap me. He was all too cold, irrational, unpredictable and silent. He’d often just show up red-faced, steaming and swinging. Take it like a man or take it like a mouse. How many times do I have to tell you?! He was so young when he had me. He was wild, but not in a way...

Mother Nature and the Universe sneaked in some words to help map and bleed our neural plasma, and we started whispering things like, "Reach out and touch her." Now we are programmed to reach out and reach back, ramble and spit all the mess our misfiring experiment comes up with.

The winter will come and you will wake up one day and tell yourself that you are not in love anymore. You will slow it down, scale it, fight with every fiber of your being to not be the one left alone. To not be the one who stays when it's time to leave and you are determined to not love him anymore.

An alchemy of love is a simple kind of love that resides within one but is blended in two.

There are rocks in places. There are clouds and crags and vicious beasts. There is decay, rebirth and decay again. There are long sandy beaches and the chill of the ocean in the morning. There are forests and rivers and tiny seasonal flowers. There are trails, wilderness, desert, warmth and cold. And there will always be that sunrise I know we both shall watch, your hand tightly in mine.

It is time to start believing in the one person who deserves to be believed in most, you. In reality, you are not bad. You never were.

This feeling of being alive transforms you, and whether you know it or not, you have started transforming the world.

There is so much more to who we are and why we are here than I believe is humanly conceivable. I do believe that the more aware and conscious we are about the choices we make and the words we speak to others and ourselves, the more it deeply affects our being.

This should go without saying, but wild man lovin' is best done by a wild woman. Get outside together. Sleep all tangled up beneath the stars. Bask in the moonlight. Furthermore, talk about the moon, bring her right into your relationship because she informs so much of the way it shifts and changes.

Regret, like an annoying mosquito, still hovers close, ready to bite my sweet ass. I smother the notion like a shawl around my chest, protecting me from the moonlit nights remembrance. I whisper knowingly, "No regrets, just love."

I often find myself answering a plethora of mundane questions as soon as my sexual orientation is revealed to someone. Given that I'm not blessed with the patient grace required to answer this unvaried line of questioning, I will instead offer you the deepest wisdom I can summon from the heart of a woman in love with another woman.

'What is your background?' was a common thing people would ask me if they were of Indian descent. They would tell me that my last name was of Punjab heritage and they always said I should go to my homeland. I convinced myself that I didn't need him, but his absence stretched long and wide. The feeling of abandonment and the relationship to rejection were sewn into my side, stamped on my forehead, and burned into my heart.

I want to sit across from you for days and take everything from you. But I never will. I will however, keep writing you into my life. You will forever take up entire chapters, and sometimes you'll make it into the footnotes. Once in a while, the preface will be dedicated to you.

What are the moments that make up your day and night? Where has this year carried you? What is at the center of your knowing? Do you find comfort and truth in the unknowing? Does music hold the lineage of your stories as it does mine?

Just once to see the 'real being' that seeks to see me -- like the waves that roll up the beach to catch but a pining glimpse of the soft sands that dream to sip the ocean. True love is what's left, when we fail to any longer understand it through its decomposition.

Again your flames and my waves could dance together. My water to sooth your sharp heart, to dampen your fury, with a promise to shelter your flame from the wind, so it would never go out.

You are more real to me than most things. I want you in a precious way. A world is formed without speaking, not desperate, or touched with broken hearts. I don’t know what time it is and it doesn't matter how long we are here.

Tell me, which lion born forgives itself for pretending to be a zebra? Which drop of rain flies upward in some vain attempt to kiss the very face of our raging Sun? Who am I to deny the very life we were born to share?

No, women are not just lesbian because they have been hurt by men. They are just women who find a vulva more sacred than a cock.

My heart collides with reality and scatters bits of me everywhere. I know this place. I've groped about it before. sending out emotional bounty hunters to scour the wreckage and drag back pieces of myself to wedge and shoehorn it all back in wherever it will fit.

I love myself in your eyes, it is how I imagine the Divine must see me. I can feel her coming through you, beckoning me home. Wrapped in your arms I feel the invisible cloak caressing my shoulders. You excite me, you terrify me, you ground me and uproot me all in a choreographed dance that is mesmerizing to behold.

Everything about the way I was raised taught me to hide my real feelings. When you're hiding, you're conflicted, and when you're conflicted, you're going to fight with you.

It was a year ago you found yourself living in Hell, and for all I know, you may still reside there. For a time, I moved in with you. I'm not entirely sure you noticed my presence in the darkness, but I did my best to keep out of the way.

Love is the answer. Love is freedom. Love is the soul in its purest form.

Revelations can be startling to the body, let alone mixing in the mind and spirit. Upfront, close, personal and glaring in a bittersweet, please-stop-fighting-with-yourself, sort of way. It's a knowing that something is completely real and true and yet the impact and integration of this space is a harsh mind f*ck.

Do you know that I will lay my strength beside you and surrender? Forgive me, but is who I am, weakened into broken submission when I feel you close. When you are as the ocean, you are my iconic metaphor with clarity — the kind that floats by unnoticed, hides in corners, or drops to the floor.

After my surgery, I had a little time to think, and it put me in a tailspin.

yes, this poem is about being this life is about being and right now I am all about being

24 years of gripping on to a secret -- hiding my true sexual identity from the world -- built up to a breakdown after I fell in love for the first time.

Moving away from or releasing something bad for you (or even just good), with the intention of staying open to something even greater.

I can still remember the sheer terror, the desperate heartbreak felt when I realized that Peter Pan was just a fairy tale, a childhood fantasy that I had carried into my adulthood.

I imagined that I would unzip my chest and let my heart fall onto this paper. That in between beats, I would reach inside and gently pull on the loose strings, opening it up, and the stories that hurt too much to speak of would spill out and out and I would catch them in my cupped hands and throw them over my left shoulder.

I will leave you naked and biting. Leave you clawing at the sheets. Leave you surrounded by owls and hawks and flowers that only bloom when no one is watching.

You must climb the mountain and be knocked the hell off of it.

Make me feel not alone. Make me feel known. Make me feel chosen. Make me feel. Make me. The very thing I do not want. I never want anyone to make me. I always want to choose.

Sometimes it's okay to be scared and confused and worried about moving forward, and sometimes it's okay to not believe anything that all of the people around you have to say.

If these three words could expand and show us all the meanings hidden in it, could it look anything like this? I love you... as an imperfect being, someone who will disappoint me one day, and then again, because you are human.

Feeling the connection of the knowing that another feels you and sees you is a form of relaxation or cellular ease. My body lets go of the struggle or attachment when I receive empathy. I surrender into the flow of energy passing all around me. My held breath stored in my chest releases, because I know deep in my cells I do not need to flee. I am safe, I am protected, I am guided.

And sometimes the storm comes. It hits hard. And when it does, we cannot find shelter. We are swept up in its force under cracked open heavens. And there is nothing to do but let the flood waters rise, and yes -- sometimes things break and sometimes we break and sometimes it seems that the damage is catastrophic and that nothing will ever be the same again.

I love your laugh. The eternal echoes in my ears. I love your little ways, each and every one of them. I love your life and how richly it has blessed me.

I don't know exactly when I realized that my mother didn't love me, only that it is a shadow that was formed many years ago and has followed me around all of my life. Even as a baby I look miserable and I wonder, did she know then? That she didn't want me?

I could never do this in a monogamous relationship. There was simply no space. It wasn't because we were sexually exclusive; it was because monogamy inevitably leads to emotional exclusivity. I wanted to be as emotionally open as possible.

Before my body sank completely, my soul pushed out of my chest cavity and sprang towards the clouds.

You see, life's trials have divine value for me; they are the light on my path, the blessings disguised as sorrow and the firing up of my essence. For a short while, before you appeared as Dick, you were allowed to litter my mind with masked lies. You also caged my soul with complexities and showered my heart with bullshit. But I still am extremely grateful for all of this.

Her. Not a leaving for her. But the way all the leavings were leading to here, now. Where the Yes is clear and complete, and all the work worth it. And the moments of knowing, that we don't get to here without the trail of all the loving, and the way it sometimes marks us with the raised welts of damages done and sometimes illuminates us and our own hunting hearts. But we are here, with all that brought us to here. And her face makes something in me believe, that the great gift is not the erasure of life lived but the grounded rapture of meeting here, her, after the fall.

A heart with powerful intentions, which I haven't been able to articulate… at least not the way I want to… because there is a war of incredible poetry that wages in my gut between sharp intellect and wild emotion… and the debris of sentiment floating throughout the air, the well-meaning gun smoke of thought… finds this writer oftentimes… without words.

Maybe something happened to me one day. A strange thing. A painful, beautiful thing. A shock or a slow-burning, quietly tumultuous thing. In the stillness that followed, I went in search of all the locked doors, all the hidden places and every dark, sealed-off part inside, and when I found them, I used all my strength to prise them open.

I accept and embrace that I am tender, emotional and sometimes downright raw. I am what I am, my soul needs me to be me.

In a world of unpredictable and a life of unknowns, I make You this promise.

Without the fear that was not mine, heart to heart for infinity in timeless love, across space and time, we will dance together forever, the gypsy and the merchant.

you are still here because of anticipation and longing and trust and truth and mystery because of what burns deep within you and what you sense just beyond the veil

When he breaks my heart, I beg myself to remember that he is but a boy, unable to articulate his feelings and wading through my baggage to find his own path.

As a rebellious creative who pretty much abhors social conventions, I have always held an inner revolution against our boxed love culture -- the way we attempt to tie love down to our expectations, labels, attachments, and claim some peripheral form of ownership upon another heart. Those who know me have asked, with true curiosity, why I have decided to marry.

Down dimensions of telepathic trips, sway my hips, trace your kiss with my fingertips, to taste you long after I walk away. I stop to close my eyes. Can you feel yourself love? Can you hear your own voice? Silence your mind. And we dance.

What if we have the courage to be truly authentic and deeply intimate with everybody we meet? And see where that goes…?

Till all that was left was our molten core of Truth and Bliss and Savage passion and Pure unadulterated liveliness And even though she is gone And every nerve ending wails Her name I am finally Fucking Alive

We have only known each other in small moments, our paths crossing in a river of daylight and then disconnecting again, but I miss you, Alegría. I miss the feeling that you reside inside me, your ebbing light that begins in the corners of my ribcage and then starts to glow.