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The Raven’s Poison
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Every book has a beginning.

Sometimes it begins with an idea, a dream, or a single sentence. For me, The Raven’s Poison began long before I ever knew I was writing a book. In fact, it began before I even understood that what I was writing was poetry.

I grew up with my mother constantly in and out of the hospital. My parents were divorced, my sister was the oldest, and I was the youngest. My mother needed a liver transplant, and although the transplant gave her years she otherwise might not have had, the medications she took over time eventually damaged her kidneys.

When I was young, I remember being told, “She won’t live long.”

Those words stayed somewhere inside me.

Yet my mother defied that expectation. She became the longest-living recipient of a liver transplant at the time, living for twelve years after her transplant. She passed away in 1994.

I was twenty years old.

When I was fourteen, I moved in with my father. I still remember sitting in the car with my mother when she was crying and telling me that it made sense for me to go. I didn’t fully understand everything that was happening around me. I only knew that something in my life was changing, and I didn’t know how to process it.

So I began writing.

I didn’t call it poetry. I didn’t think of myself as a poet. I simply wrote down what I couldn’t say.

Those early words became a place where I could put my confusion, grief, anger, loneliness, and everything else I didn’t have the language for. Looking back now, I realize that poetry had found me before I ever realized I was searching for it.

Eventually, I dropped out of college. I felt lost, and I moved in with my girlfriend at the time. She was an artistic person studying photography in college, and she appreciated my writing. She encouraged that part of me.

But my life wasn’t in a good place.

Somewhere along the way, I became someone I wasn’t.

A few years later, I moved back home to try to put my life back together. I returned to school and began rebuilding myself. Eventually, I met a woman at my brother’s wedding. We fell in love, married, and began a life together. She had a daughter when we met, and over the years, our family grew in its own complicated way.

Throughout much of my marriage, I hid my poetry.

I kept that part of myself tucked away.

Over the years, my marriage began to unravel. My wife became an alcoholic, and somewhere along the way, we drifted apart. My father had also struggled with alcoholism, and I began to recognize patterns in my own life that I hadn’t understood before.

I also had to confront something about myself.

I was immature. I lacked the courage and confidence to speak honestly about what was happening. I didn’t know how to set boundaries. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself.

Then her daughter witnessed her mother drunk.

That changed everything.

During the divorce, my ex-wife attempted suicide while her daughter was in the house. Her daughter called me, and I walked her through what to do. At the same time, I was struggling to hold myself together.

That was when I realized I needed help.

I went to therapy.

For a year, I sat with someone and began confronting parts of myself that I had spent years avoiding. I continued writing. Slowly, I began understanding that writing wasn’t simply something I did—it was one of the ways I understood my life.

Therapy taught me something important:

You cannot change what you refuse to face.

I began setting goals. I learned to make short-term goals and long-term goals. I learned to be more honest with myself. I learned that healing doesn’t mean forgetting what happened. Sometimes healing means finally allowing yourself to understand what happened.

A few years after my divorce, I learned that my ex-wife had lost her job, lost her home, and ultimately died by suicide.

There are experiences in life that don’t fit neatly into words.

Grief is one of them.

Therapy helped me finally begin dealing with the grief of losing my mother—grief I had carried for years without truly confronting. I had spent so much of my life moving forward that I never realized how much of my past was still following me.

I learned that there is no expiration date on grief.

You can carry something for decades and still eventually find a way to put it down.

Eventually, I remarried. I found someone who supported my dreams, encouraged my goals, and allowed me to become more fully myself.

And somewhere along that journey, I returned to my writing.

That brings me to The Raven’s Poison.

This book isn’t simply a collection of poems. It represents the choices we make—and the choices we don’t make. It represents the patterns we inherit, the patterns we repeat, and the patterns we eventually learn to break.

There is darkness in these pages, but there is also growth.

There is pain, but there is also hope.

There are things I wish I had done differently. There are things I wish I had understood sooner. But I have learned that regret doesn’t have to become a life sentence.

We are never too old to change.

We are never too old to learn.

We are never too old to become someone better than the person we were yesterday.

The Raven’s Poison is, in many ways, a reflection of that belief.

The raven represents the things that follow us—the memories, mistakes, grief, fears, and patterns that can become almost like shadows. The poison represents what happens when we allow those things to remain inside us unchecked.

But poison doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

We can choose to confront it.

We can choose to heal.

We can choose differently.

Today, I am in a place I never thought I would be. I have a wife and a son whom I deeply love. I have goals. I have dreams. I write. And perhaps most importantly, I am still working on myself.

I don’t believe any of us ever truly finish that work.

The Raven’s Poison is my reminder of that.

It is a book born from loss, mistakes, grief, relationships, choices, and ultimately, growth.

It is a reminder that our past may explain us, but it doesn’t have to define us.

And sometimes, the words we write while we’re trying to survive become the very words that help us understand how we lived.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

The lie is never loud at first. It arrives in polished briefings, measured pauses, and carefully chosen words that ask a frightened nation to trust without question. It wears the costume of certainty, even when certainty does not exist. Behind podiums and television lights, truth can become negotiable, shaved into something more convenient than honest.

If history judges him as having misled Americans, it will not be because science change, that is what science is meant to do, but because trust fractures when confidence outruns evidence, when inconvenient questions are dismissed instead of answered, and when transparency becomes selective. A nation can forgive mistakes made in uncertainty more easily than it forgives the feeling that it was managed rather than informed.

The deepest wound is not disagreement over masks, mandates, or laboratories. It is the suspicion that ordinary people were expected to carry burdens while those in power carried narratives. Once doubt enters the bloodstream of democracy, every future warning competes with yesterday’s unanswered questions.

Truth has a stubborn habit of surviving every press conference. It waits beneath headlines, beneath politics, beneath the applause and the outrage. And when the lights fade and the microphones are packed away, history asks only one question of every public servant: Were you honest with the people who trusted you?

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I have spent so much of myself believing that if I loved you harder, listened better, held you longer, or gave you every beautiful piece of my heart, one day you would finally feel full. But there is a quiet grief in realizing that I will never be enough to make you happy. No amount of tenderness I offer can reach the place inside you that I cannot touch. I could empty my soul into your hands, and you would still leave with room for more.

Perhaps that is the cruelest kind of love, not that I have too little to give, but that everything I have is still not what you need. And so I remain here, carrying a love that is endless, while learning that someone can give you their entire world and still never become the home you’re searching for.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

My son, you are the quiet miracle that gave my life a new horizon. Before you, I measured my days by time. After you, I measured them by your laughter, your courage, your dreams, and every step you took toward becoming yourself.

You are not simply part of my world. You are the reason it shines. Every hope I carry, every prayer I whisper, every strength I discover begins and ends with you. If I could gather every star from the night sky, they still would not equal the light you bring into my heart.

No matter how tall you grow or where life carries you, you will always be the greatest love I have ever known. My son, you are my heart walking through the world, my greatest joy, my endless pride, my everything.

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excerpt from “The Raven’s Poison”
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON


Once upon a midnight fear
She took a sip of corrosion
Debilitating manners and quirks
Fumbling through a frenzy
Gliding inside hallucinations
Staggering outside the commotions
A recollection of mourning


Stern exchanges melting
Comments and remarks growl
Sentiments dressed in black
Treasures whispering hush
Ripping dead skin with caution
Crumbling faith turns into dirt
A recollection of mourning


Hunger flexing with animosity
Greed panting with saliva
In holy matrimony with the raven
She tasted the hollow bitterness
Numb and disgusted by the poison
Infuriated with the toxic rants
A recollection of mourning


Provoked by exasperation
Anxiety wrapped around her neck
Choking on sour corruption
Addicted to the murmurs
Inhaling the virulent winds
Wounded by a malicious tongue
A recollection of mourning


A catastrophic touch bellowed
Infatuation hung as a disaster
Benevolence was a chewed up dog bone
Loneliness exhaled rapidly
Sympathy was a an old rag
Love was just mucus from a cough
A recollection of mourning

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

At 3:45 AM, the house was silent except for the tired hum of the refrigerator and the restless ticking of a clock I had never noticed before. Funny how certain sounds only reveal themselves when your illusions finally die. The darkness sat beside me like an old friend, patient and knowing, while I stared at the ceiling and replayed every conversation, every touch, every promise that once felt sacred.

I used to think love was hidden in the little things. The way you smiled when I walked through the door. The way your fingers found mine without thinking. The way your voice softened when you spoke my name. I built entire cathedrals out of those moments. I carved meaning into ordinary gestures and called it devotion. I turned crumbs into feasts and shadows into sunlight because I wanted so desperately to believe.

But at 3:45 AM, truth arrived without knocking. Truth is cruel that way. It does not storm through the front door. It slips through cracks in your heart. It waits until the excuses grow tired and the lies lose their disguises. Then it settles into the room beside you and asks a question you have spent months avoiding: what if she never loved you the way you loved her?

The question sat in my chest like a stone. I thought about the countless hours spent working late, convincing myself that sacrifice was proof of commitment. I remembered every exhausted morning, every missed opportunity, every dream postponed because I wanted to build a future sturdy enough for two people. I carried the weight gladly because I thought we were carrying it together. Now, in the dim blue glow of the clock, I realized I had been carrying both of us alone.

Suddenly, memories began changing shape. Moments I once painted gold revealed the rust beneath them. The excitement in your voice was brightest when money entered the conversation. Your affection seemed strongest after bonuses, promotions, overtime shifts. The arguments rarely centered on love, respect, or understanding. They circled finances like vultures circling a wounded animal. I hated myself for noticing, because once you see something, you cannot unsee it.
The realization felt like standing in a museum and discovering every masterpiece was a forgery. The colors remained beautiful. The frames remained elegant. But the authenticity was gone, and without authenticity, beauty becomes decoration. Maybe that is what I had become—decoration. A provider. A paycheck wearing a heartbeat.

The thought hollowed me out. Outside, the moon hung low above the sleeping neighborhood, pale and distant. Streetlights cast long amber shadows across the pavement, and for a moment I imagined my life from above. Years of effort. Years of loyalty. Years of believing that love was something earned through consistency and sacrifice. Maybe that was my mistake. Love should never have to be purchased, not with money, not with exhaustion, not with pieces of yourself surrendered one at a time until there is nothing left but obligation.

I realized I could list every bill I paid, every burden I carried, every problem I solved. Yet I struggled to remember the last time I felt truly seen. Not appreciated for what I provided. Not admired for what I accomplished. Seen. The difference suddenly felt enormous. A wallet is useful. A person is loved.
At 3:45 AM, I understood that I had confused usefulness with affection. And that realization hurt more than anger ever could. Anger is hot. It burns quickly. It gives you something to fight. This was different. This was winter. A cold settling over memories that once kept me warm.

All the moments I silenced my own instincts because admitting the truth felt unbearable. Hope is a stubborn thing. It keeps watering dead flowers long after the garden has surrendered. I had been tending a garden of ghosts. Yet somewhere beneath the grief, another feeling emerged: relief. Small at first. Barely noticeable. Like the first gray hint of dawn beyond a black horizon. Because truth, no matter how painful, is lighter than pretending.

For the first time in a long time, I stopped negotiating with reality. I stopped rewriting the story to protect my heart. I stopped searching for evidence that contradicted what I already knew. Maybe you loved what I gave. Maybe you loved what I could provide. Maybe you loved the comfort, the security, the stability. But love should reach for the soul before it reaches for the wallet, and if it doesn’t, then it isn’t love I was mourning—it was an illusion.

At 3:45 AM, I finally buried it. The clock continued ticking. The refrigerator continued humming. The world continued turning. Yet something inside me had changed forever.

The pain remained, but it no longer felt like a prison. It felt like a doorway. Beyond it waited uncertainty, loneliness, and healing. Beyond it waited mornings where I no longer had to earn affection through sacrifice. Beyond it waited the possibility of being valued not for what I could give, but for who I was.
And as the first traces of dawn began softening the darkness outside my window, I realized something surprising. The saddest part was not discovering that she may have loved the paycheck more than the person. The saddest part was how long I believed that was all I deserved. The most beautiful part was finally understanding that it wasn’t.

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Storm Fragments

ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I call myself black, not as a surrender, but as a language I learned before I had the words to explain anything else. It is the color I reach for when everything feels too loud, too exposed, too eager to be understood. Black is where I hide my edges, where I fold my contradictions into something that looks simple from the outside. It is not emptiness to me. It is containment. It is the quiet decision to hold everything in rather than spill it where it might be misunderstood.

You laugh at my sickness and whisper “Fuck You” with a grin in my ear. Am I supposed to be rattled?

I have worn it in different forms. Sometimes as silence. Sometimes as restraint. Sometimes as the way I walk into a room and refuse to be rearranged by it. Black is not sadness in my story—it is structure. It is the frame around everything I have survived without naming each fracture out loud. It is what remains when I stop performing brightness for the comfort of others.

You stare into my predator like eyes and feel a closeness with your “Fuck You” tone.

But even in that certainty, there is a pull I do not always admit.

Because I do not only want to be what I am. I want, in the hidden corners of thought, to be the color you despise the most. Not because I crave your rejection, but because I want to matter enough to provoke something real. Indifference feels like erasure. But dislike, even resistance, means I have entered your emotional world in a way that cannot be ignored.

There is a strange honesty in being despised. It means you have been seen without softness, without polishing, without the convenient filters people use to make each other easier to tolerate. I do not romanticize that feeling, but I understand its weight. To be disliked is still to be acknowledged. To be remembered. To leave a mark that does not fade politely into the background.

I imagine sometimes being that color in your mind—the one you associate with a feeling you cannot quite settle. Not light enough to forgive easily. Not soft enough to dismiss. A shade that lingers after the moment is over, sitting quietly in the edges of your thoughts when you are alone and honest.

Come on say it again – “Fuck You!” I dare you.

And yet, even that desire is not really about hatred. It is about presence. About refusing to be temporary in someone’s emotional landscape. I do not want to be something you pass through without noticing. I want to be something you cannot fully unsee, even when you try.

Black remains my foundation. My beginning and my return. But beneath it, or maybe beside it, there is this quieter contradiction: the wish to be transformed in your perception, to become a color that carries weight in your memory, even if that weight is uncomfortable.

Because being forgotten feels like the only true disappearance.

And I would rather be a color you struggle with than a silence you never had to acknowledge at all.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

They speak to me as if I am less than human, as if my silence is permission and my patience is weakness. Every insult lands like ash on my skin. Every curse digs a little deeper, settling beneath the surface where bruises cannot be seen. I stand there, carrying words that were never meant to heal, only to wound.


Some days I replay the threats in the dark. The venom in a voice. The promise of harm disguised as power. “I will make you a widow.” “I will drown you.” Sentences that linger long after they are spoken, circling the room like hungry crows. They stain the air. They turn ordinary moments into shadows. They teach the heart to expect storms even beneath clear skies.


And still, I remain. Not untouched, not unbroken, but standing. A house battered by years of weather. A forest scarred by fire. The darkness has learned my name, yet it has not claimed me. The cruelty they offered became a river, and though it tried to pull me under, I learned how to breathe beneath black water and return to the surface carrying every wound like proof that I survived.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

There is a strange loneliness in being loved by voices that live hundreds of miles away while sharing a roof with strangers who know the shape of your face but have forgotten the language of your heart.


The people on glowing screens ask how you are sleeping. They remember the stories you told months ago. They notice when your laughter sounds forced. They reach across impossible distances and somehow find you. Yet in the rooms around you, doors open and close like quiet verdicts. Plates clatter. Televisions hum. Conversations pass through the house like ghosts through walls, never stopping long enough to touch you.


You sit among them and feel absent.
The couch beside you remains occupied, but the silence between you stretches wider than oceans. You learn that proximity is a poor substitute for connection. You learn that a person can be surrounded by family, by partners, by familiar footsteps, and still feel as though they have been abandoned in the center of an empty city.


At night, the house settles into darkness. You hear life happening behind closed doors and wonder when exactly you became a visitor here. When exactly your words stopped mattering. When exactly your presence became furniture.


The cruelest distance is not measured in miles.
It is measured in unanswered questions, in eyes that no longer look up when you enter a room, in the hollow ache of realizing the people furthest away know more about your soul than the people who pass you in the hallway every day.


And so you keep reaching for those distant lights, those names on screens, those voices carried by invisible signals through the dark. Because sometimes the only place you feel seen is somewhere you have never been, by people you have never touched, while the people closest to you remain impossibly, devastatingly out of reach.

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Storm Fragments

ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

At 11:45 AM he parks beneath a sun that hangs over the asphalt like a tired overseer. The morning has already spent itself. Meetings, deadlines, errands, obligations, phone calls, reminders scribbled onto scraps of paper and tucked into pockets. The weight of being needed has followed him since before dawn. Husband. Father. Provider. Problem solver. The man who remembers what everyone else forgets. The man who fixes things before anyone notices they are broken. By lunchtime, the hours have already taken their share from him. His attention has been divided a hundred different ways, pulled by responsibilities that never seem to end. He feels the familiar fatigue settling into his shoulders, not the exhaustion of hard labor, but the quieter weariness that comes from carrying a life filled with expectations.

The restaurant is nothing special, a fast food place wedged between a gas station and a pharmacy. The sign hums softly above the drive thru while cars drift through the parking lot beneath the heat of the day. Inside, the scent of salt and grease hangs in the air. A teenager wipes down tables with absentminded motions. The soda machine rattles. The fryer crackles. It is ordinary in every possible way, which is exactly why he likes it. There is comfort in places that ask nothing of you. He orders the same meal he always does. A burger. Fries. A Coke. Nothing expensive. Nothing memorable. Food that arrives quickly and expects no conversation.

Tray in hand, he chooses the booth furthest from everyone else. The seat creaks beneath him as he settles in. Sunlight pours through the window and stretches across the table like a warm blanket. He unwraps the burger slowly, not because he is hungry, but because he is savoring something else entirely. For the first time all day, there is no one asking a question. No one needs an answer. No one needs a problem solved. No one needs him to make a decision. The silence arrives gradually, cautious and unfamiliar at first, before finally settling beside him. He welcomes it like an old friend.

Outside, the world continues moving without hesitation. Cars pass. People hurry from one obligation to another. Someone laughs into a phone. Someone argues with a coworker. A delivery truck unloads boxes near the pharmacy entrance. Life continues its endless march. Yet inside this booth, time seems to slow. He takes a bite of the burger. The flavors are simple and predictable. Salt. Bread. Meat. Nothing extraordinary. Yet somehow it tastes better than meals served in nicer places. Perhaps because this meal is not simply about eating. It is about disappearing for a little while. It is about finding a corner of the day where he can exist without being responsible for anyone except himself.

His thoughts begin to loosen their grip. Not vanish completely, but soften around the edges. The mortgage payment due next week fades into the background. The repairs waiting at home lose their urgency. Work emails, school schedules, insurance paperwork, grocery lists, upcoming appointments, and all the countless details that fill every day retreat into the distance. For twenty minutes he allows himself to set those burdens down. They will still be there when he returns. They always are. But right now they can wait.

Most people would never notice the significance of such a moment. They would see only a man eating lunch alone in a corner booth. A forgettable figure among countless others. Yet there is something sacred hidden within the ordinary. There is a quiet dignity in giving yourself permission to rest before exhaustion hardens into frustration. There is wisdom in stepping away from the constant demands of life long enough to hear your own thoughts again. Solitude is often mistaken for loneliness, but they are not the same thing. Loneliness is an emptiness. Solitude is a refuge.

He watches sunlight shimmer against the windshield of a nearby truck. Dust drifts lazily through beams of light. An old song plays over the restaurant speakers, one he has not heard in years. The melody unlocks something buried beneath the surface. For a brief moment he remembers being younger. He remembers afternoons that belonged entirely to him, before calendars became crowded and responsibilities multiplied. The memory brings a small smile to his face. Not because he wishes to return to those years, but because he has traveled far enough to appreciate them. There is a certain gratitude that arrives only with time.

The fries grow cold beside him. Ice shifts quietly inside the plastic cup. He takes another sip of Coke and lets the carbonation sting his throat. Around him, conversations rise and fall like distant waves. None of them require his attention. None of them belong to him. The realization feels strangely liberating. For once, he is not carrying the emotional weight of a room. He is simply another person passing through the day.

Soon the meal is nearly finished. The burger wrapper lies crumpled on the tray. Only a few fries remain. He checks the time and feels the familiar tug of reality returning. The afternoon is waiting. Work is waiting. Home is waiting. There will be more questions, more decisions, more responsibilities seeking his attention. There always are. And he will return to them willingly because the people he loves are worth every sacrifice. Love is often less glamorous than people imagine. More often than not, it is found in consistency. It is showing up when you are tired. It is carrying burdens without complaint. It is choosing responsibility every day.

Before standing, he allows himself one final moment of stillness. He closes his eyes briefly and listens. The hum of the restaurant. The distant sound of traffic. The gentle clink of ice against plastic. Small sounds. Ordinary sounds. Yet together they create a rare and precious silence within him. A space where nothing is demanded. A space where he can simply exist.

Then he gathers his tray and rises from the booth. The spell is over. The world outside has not changed. The bills remain. The responsibilities remain. The endless motion of life continues exactly as before. Yet something inside him feels lighter. Not transformed. Not healed. Just steadier. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes all a man needs is a burger, fries, a Coke, and twenty quiet minutes at 11:45 AM to remember that even the strongest hearts deserve a place to rest.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Apathy is an itch beneath the skin, a constant irritation no amount of scratching can soothe. It lingers in the quiet corners of conversations, in the hollow spaces between headlines and tragedies, in the tired shrug that follows another broken promise. Very few listen. Most only hear. Words pass through them like wind through dead branches, making noise but leaving nothing changed.

The itch grows. It crawls through crowded rooms and glowing screens, through prayers, protests, and desperate confessions. People nod, people agree, people move on. The world becomes a chorus of echoes, everyone speaking, almost no one listening.

And still the itch remains, demanding attention, demanding feeling. It is the discomfort of knowing something is wrong and watching indifference dress itself as wisdom. It is the ache of caring in a world that has learned how not to. It is the scratch that draws blood, the wound that refuses to close, the reminder that silence can be louder than any scream.

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April Winters
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I notice the exact moment your composure begins to fracture for me. It always starts in your breathing — slower at first, then uneven, little pauses caught between anticipation and surrender. I stand close enough to feel the warmth radiating from your skin, close enough to hear the soft sound that leaves your throat when my hand tilts your chin upward. That quiet, trembling noise is almost reverent, like your body is answering me before your mind can even catch up.

You obey so beautifully when I speak softly.

I tell you to stay still, and you try, though I can feel the effort shaking through you. Every breath turns fragile beneath my attention. Every glance you give me feels heavy with trust and hunger, with that deep craving to be guided somewhere darker than your own restraint would ever allow. I watch your lips part as another helpless sound escapes you, half moan, half surrender, and I swear I could live inside that moment forever.

There is something intoxicating about watching you yield willingly. Not because I force it from you, but because you ache to give it to me. Because every whispered command wraps around you like velvet chains, tightening slowly until all you can focus on is my voice and the heat building between us. You react to praise like it is oxygen. One low murmur of approval and your entire body softens, another shaky breath spilling from you as though you have been waiting desperately to hear it.

I move carefully with you, savoring every reaction. The subtle arch of your body toward my touch. The tiny whimpers you try unsuccessfully to swallow down. The way your pulse jumps when I lean close enough for my words to brush against your skin. You make the most beautiful sounds when you stop fighting your own desire, when you let yourself sink fully into obedience and trust me to hold the weight of it.

And I do hold it.

I hold every trembling exhale, every needy little gasp, every shiver that rolls through you when I tell you how good you are for me. I let the silence stretch just long enough for anticipation to consume you before I speak again, low and possessive, watching the sound of my voice alone pull another soft moan from your lips.

By then, you are already lost inside me completely.

Eyes heavy. Breathing broken. Every inch of you tuned to my approval like it is the only thing keeping your heart beating steadily. And when I finally praise you again, when I let my hand rest against your skin and tell you exactly how perfectly you surrender for me, the sound you make in response is almost enough to ruin my own control.

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April Winters
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Your beauty is dangerous in the quietest way. It doesn’t arrive all at once like lightning; it settles slowly into my bones, deepening every time you speak, every time you reveal another soft truth about yourself. The desire grows because it is not only your body that calls to me, but the way your soul moves beneath your skin. The way you care. The way your laughter lingers in my head long after the room has gone silent.

I think about you constantly, in fragments and floods. In the middle of conversations, in the silence before sleep, in the aching moments between one breath and the next. You have become a beautiful interruption to every ordinary thing. I crave your presence the way flowers ache toward sunlight, helpless to resist what makes them bloom.

And maybe that is what terrifies me most. Not how badly I want you, but how naturally it happens. How every piece of who you are pulls me closer without effort. Your beauty opened the door, but it was your heart, your mind, your softness, your fire that made me stay there, endlessly wandering the halls of you.

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ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I move through my days like they’ve already happened, like I am remembering instead of living, untouched by urgency, untouched by fear. Time passes without asking anything of me, and I give it nothing back. The idea of an ending doesn’t disturb me; it just sits there, distant and weightless, like a horizon I don’t feel compelled to reach or avoid.

There is a quiet in not caring, a stillness that settles deeper than sadness ever could. No fight, no resistance, just a soft acceptance that everything fades whether I hold on or not. And no one will ever know if my poetry is me or something I invented to feel less invisible, whether these words are truth or just a shape I hide behind. If my name disappears, if my breath one day simply doesn’t return, it feels no more significant than any other moment slipping by unnoticed. I exist, and then I won’t, and somewhere in that truth is a calm I cannot quite explain.

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April Winters
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Your lips meet mine and stay there, not rushed, not asking, just knowing, and the world softens around the edges as if it’s slipping out of focus on purpose. The kiss deepens slowly, like something unfolding rather than beginning, warm and unsteady in the best way, until breath turns uneven and shared between us.

There’s a quiet rhythm to it, a gentle pull and return, mouths learning each other without words, each second stretching longer than it should. My hand finds you, not searching, just tracing, following the heat that seems to rise wherever we touch, as if your skin remembers me before I even arrive.

Everything feels fluid, unguarded, like we’re dissolving into the moment instead of holding onto it. The closeness builds without urgency, just a steady, undeniable warmth, the kind that lingers and deepens, until there’s nothing left but the slow, consuming pull of you and the feeling of not wanting to stop.

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April Winters
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

You are perfect to me in the way the morning is, effortless and impossible to recreate. From the quiet strength in your eyes to the softness that follows when you let your guard fall, every detail of you feels intentional, like the world slowed down just to get you right. I find myself tracing you in my mind again and again, as if I might miss something if I don’t.

There is a pull in you I don’t try to resist, something deeper than want, something that lingers. A quiet craving lives in the space between us, where I imagine your lips meeting mine, not rushed, not fleeting, but certain, like it was always meant to happen this way. And in that thought alone, I feel everything I’ve been trying not to say.

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ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

We stopped belonging to each other long before we ever had the courage to admit it. It happened quietly, the way cold seeps into a room without asking, settling into the spaces between us until everything felt distant, untouched. Your voice lost its weight. Your eyes stopped reaching for me. We were standing in the same place, but already living separate endings.

I used to believe in the illusion of you—that somehow your presence meant permanence, that the way you said my name carried something real. I held onto fragments, convinced they were enough to build something lasting. But you were never whole with me. You loved in pieces, and I was foolish enough to try and make a home out of what was never meant to stay.

There’s a certain kind of cold that comes with understanding the truth. You were never mine. You were only ever passing through, something temporary that I mistook for fate. I let you linger anyway, let you convince me that half-love was still love, that emptiness could be dressed up as connection. I stood there in it, calling it warmth, even as it hollowed me out.

You touched me like something familiar but not important. Like a place you could return to when everything else felt unbearable, but never somewhere you intended to remain. I was convenience, not choice. And I learned that difference in the silence you left behind.

Now, without you, everything feels sharper. Cleaner. There’s no confusion here, no false comfort. Just the quiet honesty of absence, and the weight of what never truly existed.

I am not yours. Not in the way I deserved to be held, not in the way that lingers beyond convenience. And you are not mine. Not now, not ever in the way I needed you to be.

We were never something real—just two people colliding in the dark, mistaking the impact for meaning, and calling it love until it disappeared.

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Enter the storm on Amazon

You picked me up like something small and shining, turning me over in your hands as if I existed just to be noticed. You pressed your fingerprints into me, and I learned your touch like a language—how you brought me to life, how I only seemed to matter when you were looking.

I didn’t question it. I didn’t mind being the thing you reached for when the silence got too loud. You wound me up with your attention, and I gave you everything I was without asking what would happen when you stopped.

And you did stop.

No warning, no slow fading—just absence. The hands that once held me like I was something special simply forgot I was ever there.

Now I sit where you left me, not broken, just untouched. Still holding all the life you started in me, with nowhere for it to go, remembering what it felt like to be wanted… and how easily you decided I wasn’t anymore.

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My writing didn’t evolve all at once—it shifted slowly, almost quietly, until one day I realized I wasn’t approaching the page the same way anymore.

In the beginning, I wrote out of instinct. It was raw, unfiltered, and driven almost entirely by emotion. I didn’t think much about structure or intention—I just needed to get the words out. Writing was a release, a way to make sense of whatever I was feeling in the moment. And while there’s something necessary about that stage, I’ve come to understand that it was only the starting point. I wasn’t shaping the work yet. I was just letting it spill.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

I fell in love with prose poetry, and that changed everything about how I write. Without line breaks to rely on, I had to learn how to create rhythm in a different way—through sentences, through pacing, through the way one thought moves into the next. It forced me to be more intentional. Every word had to carry weight. Every paragraph had to feel like it belonged. I couldn’t hide behind form anymore. I had to trust my voice to hold the piece together.

That shift pushed me deeper into symbolism. I stopped saying things directly and started letting images speak for me. Rain became more than rain—it became steadiness, quiet strength, presence. Thunder became intensity, disruption, something that demands to be felt. I realized that meaning doesn’t always have to be handed to the reader. It can be built, layered, discovered. That’s where my writing started to feel more alive—when it stopped explaining and started suggesting.

I’ve also learned the power of details. Not more details—better ones. I’ve moved away from trying to say everything and focused more on saying the right things. A pause, a shift in someone’s expression, the way a voice softens—those moments carry more weight than over-explaining ever could. I’ve started to understand that restraint can be just as powerful as intensity, sometimes more.

Even the way I use dialogue has changed. It’s not always direct, not always spoken out loud, but it’s there—in the way my writing responds to itself, in the way ideas unfold and challenge each other. There’s a conversation happening within the work now, a sense that the piece is thinking as it moves forward, not just stating something and ending there.

A big part of this growth comes from the poets I’ve spent time with. Kerouac taught me how to let writing move, how to trust the flow without losing meaning. Neruda showed me how to make emotion feel tangible, how to give weight to love and longing. Ginsberg gave me permission to be loud when I need to be, to let the writing breathe and stretch beyond limits. Mary Oliver reminded me to pay attention—to the quiet, to the natural, to the small moments that are easy to overlook but carry so much depth. Bukowski showed me how to strip things down, how to be direct without losing impact. And O’Hara taught me that poetry doesn’t have to feel distant or elevated—it can live right here, in the everyday.

I don’t try to sound like them, but I’ve learned from them. They’ve helped me see what’s possible, and in doing that, they’ve helped me sharpen my own voice.

At the same time, I’ve become more aware of how important it is to be unique—to not just echo what I admire, but to find something that feels distinctly mine. That’s an ongoing process. I’m still discovering what my voice sounds like at its truest, still learning how to separate influence from identity. But I’m leaning into it more now, trusting that my perspective, my way of seeing and shaping the world, is enough to stand on its own.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started taking my writing more seriously. Not in a way that makes it rigid, but in a way that makes it intentional. I think more about how a piece is built, how it flows, how it holds together from beginning to end. I spend more time refining, revisiting, pushing ideas further instead of stopping at the first version. I’ve developed patience with it.

That might be the biggest change.

I don’t rush the work the way I used to. I let it unfold. I let it sit. I trust that what I’m trying to say is worth the time it takes to say it well. There’s less urgency to prove something and more focus on creating something that feels complete.

But I haven’t lost the core of why I started writing in the first place. The emotion is still there. The intensity is still there. The need to connect, to understand, to translate feeling into something real—that hasn’t gone anywhere. The difference now is that it’s guided. It’s shaped. It has direction.

I’m not just writing to get something out anymore.

I’m writing to build something that is mine.

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Enter the Storm on Amazon

I want to talk to you about everything that hums beneath the skin of the day — about the way morning light spills like melted gold across unmade beds, about the silence before a storm and how it feels like a held breath between two almost-lovers. I want to talk about old highways and forgotten towns, about the ghosts in roadside motels and the poetry scrawled in bathroom stalls, about politics and power and the quiet corruption that smiles under fluorescent lights. I want to talk about God and doubt in the same sentence, about death as a doorway and memory as a room we keep returning to barefoot.

I want to talk about art — the kind that bruises — about ink-stained fingers and guitars crying in half-empty taverns, about books that smell like dust and rebellion. I want to talk about your childhood, your scars, your favorite songs, the taste of your name when it rests on my tongue like summer rain. I want to talk about space — black holes and constellations — and whether loneliness is just gravity pulling us toward each other.

I want to talk about humor as armor, about the masks we polish, about fear, about ambition, about why we ache for meaning in a world that sells distraction. I want to talk about love — not the soft version, but the feral, thunder-lit kind that shakes picture frames off the walls. I want to talk about the future like it’s a map we’re drawing in neon, about the past like it’s a burning letter we refuse to drop.

Mostly, I want to talk about us — how two minds collide like weather systems, how conversation can feel like standing barefoot in a river of electricity — and how, if you let me, I could stay there for hours, naming every color in your sky.