I’ve overdosed on goodbyes, heartache, and a darkness I can no longer recognize I’ve overdosed on indifference, immaturity, and over used cliches I can no longer reach But my effervescent soul craves something more I’ve overdosed on circling nightmares, memories of champagne, and meaningless kisses I can no longer feel I’ve overdosed on bottles of tears, catastrophic losses and unspoken conversations that I can no longer hear But my effervescent soul craves something more I’ve overdosed on empty spaces, dead ends, and simplified poetry that I can no longer read I’ve overdosed on shallow dialogue, winter lies and intoxicating fairytales that I can no longer consume But my effervescent soul craves something more
Tomorrow’s leaves, fluttering in the October wind serenading my Sunday doubt chasing my valiant harmony Yesterday’s shadows, spoke to my brittle heartache growled at my brainwashed reflection crawled inside my grey river my pride is louder than my endless storms Tomorrow’s leaves, floating in my sweetest passions drifting within my crooning veins dancing in sugarcoated air Yesterday’s shadows, whispered and kissed me goodbye disappeared within my iron dignity disintegrated within my thunder my pride is louder than my endless storms
Once upon a scattered verse, I woke inside a sentence that refused to end. Ink dripped from the ceiling like old rain, letters crawling the walls, whispering my name as if they knew me better than the world ever had. The room was built of margins, left and right pressing inward, and every breath tasted like dusted books that had not been opened since their spines learned how to crack. I could not tell if I was young there, or old, or neither at all. Time doesn’t matter when no one is watching. I carried a pen like a dull blade, hoping if I pressed hard enough it might finally cut through silence. Outside the window, the moon hung crooked, a pale editor with nothing to say, and the stars looked like misplaced punctuation in a sentence no one bothered to finish.
I wrote because the quiet was too loud. I wrote because the walls leaned closer every time I tried to speak. I wrote about rivers swallowing names, about lovers who forgot the sound of their own laughter, about graves filled with unread prayers. I wrote until my fingers bruised purple, until the paper drank me dry, until my heart learned the steady rhythm of erasure. But no one came. There was no knock, no breath beneath the door. The world moved on with cleaner hands, scrolling past my life like an advertisement they could not skip fast enough. My words lay stacked in neat little coffins, titles etched like headstones, waiting for eyes that never arrived to pronounce them alive.
I imagined readers the way children imagine ghosts, half-hoping, half-afraid, convinced they were near. I pictured someone under a dim lamp at midnight, finding themselves inside my metaphors, feeling less alone because I had bled honestly. But imagination is a cruel lullaby. It tucks you in and leaves the window open for despair to climb inside. The nightmare deepened. Libraries turned their backs on me. Bookstores locked their doors with polished smiles. Even the wind refused to carry my lines, dropping them in gutters where rain smudged meaning into gray apology. I watched my poems age without witnesses, their voices cracking like neglected instruments left to rot in quiet rooms.
There is a special kind of decay reserved for unseen art. It does not scream; it wilts. It curls inward, questioning its own worth, asking if beauty exists at all without a gaze to confirm it. I felt that rot settle inside my chest, a slow mold growing over hope, soft and persistent, impossible to scrape away. I tried to write lighter things—sunrise, redemption, hands finding hands—but the words knew better than I did. They sagged, heavy with the truth that joy still wants to be witnessed. Even happiness grows lonely in a vacuum. Even miracles want applause, or at least a quiet nod from someone who understands.
So I returned to the dark. I described nights that chew on your spine, mirrors that refuse to reflect anything kind, dreams that end right before salvation. I became fluent in grief, conversational in despair, because sorrow, at least, kept me company. It sat beside me like a loyal stray, sharing its bones, never asking me to stop. I wrote my name again and again, afraid it would disappear if I didn’t. I tucked it between metaphors, hid it under enjambment, hoping someday someone would find it like a pressed flower in an old book and wonder who I had been. Legacy is a fragile thing when no one is listening.
The nightmare showed me the future. My notebooks boxed and labeled miscellaneous. My hard drive failing without ceremony. My words dissolving into obsolete formats. There was no obituary for the poems, no footnote acknowledging their effort. Just silence, vast and unmarked, stretching farther than language could reach. I screamed, but it came out as sentence. I begged, but it shaped itself into paragraph. Everything I felt turned into something beautiful, and that was the cruelest part of all. Beauty with no witness is still beauty, but it hurts like loving someone who will never learn your name.
At the center of the nightmare, I met myself as a child, holding a notebook too big for his hands. He looked up at me and asked if anyone heard us. I searched for an answer strong enough to survive the question and found none. So I lied. I told him yes, someday, because hope, even when false, is gentler than the truth. When I woke, the room was the same. Morning did not change anything. The world still spun without my voice, and my poems still waited, patient as graves. But I sat up anyway. I picked up the pen. Not because someone was watching, but because stopping would mean the nightmare had won.
I write for the unseen. For the maybe. For the never. For the chance that one day a stranger will stumble into my darkness and recognize it as their own. Until then, I haunt the page, a ghost made of ink and persistence, dreaming of eyes, dreaming of touch, dreaming—still—of being read.
Once upon a broken heat I learned that loneliness does not arrive loudly. It does not knock or announce itself with ceremony. It seeps in, quiet as dusk, and takes a seat beside you as if it has always belonged there. I remember thinking that friends would come naturally, like breathing, like weather, like something no one ever had to explain. I did not know then that connection was a language I would struggle to speak, that depth would be my native tongue while most people preferred simple phrases and quick exits.
I tried to make friends the way everyone else seemed to. I smiled at the right moments. I laughed when laughter was expected. I learned how to talk about nothing at all for long stretches of time, though every word felt like gravel in my mouth. I wanted to ask the questions that mattered. I wanted to talk about grief and meaning and the way memories can bruise you without warning. Instead, I learned that too much honesty empties rooms. People like the idea of depth until they feel the pressure of it pulling at their lungs.
Some friendships began brightly, full of promise, like candles lit in dark rooms. We shared music, secrets, fragments of ourselves we did not show the rest of the world. I believed that meant permanence. I believed that once someone saw you clearly, they would not leave. I was wrong more times than I can count. People drifted. People changed. People decided my sadness was too heavy to carry, my silence too loud to ignore. They left without cruelty most of the time, which somehow hurt more. There is nothing to fight against when someone simply fades.
I mourned those friendships in private. There are no rituals for the loss of the living. No headstones for people who stop calling. No ceremonies for being replaced quietly. I replayed conversations late at night, searching for the moment where I became too much or not enough. I wondered if depth was a flaw, if craving meaning was something that needed to be cured. I tried to make myself smaller. I tried to speak less, feel less, need less. It never worked for long.
Then came the deaths. Real ones. The kind that do not return your messages because they can no longer hear them. Names that once filled rooms reduced to photographs and past tense. I watched people I loved disappear into the earth and into memory, and something in me hardened and hollowed at the same time. Grief rearranged the furniture of my mind. Every loss taught me how temporary everything is, how fragile every connection becomes once you understand it can vanish without warning.
After the funerals, the world expected me to continue as if something fundamental had not been removed. Conversations returned to normal. Laughter resumed. But I carried ghosts with me everywhere. I heard the dead in quiet moments, felt them in the spaces between sentences. Their absence became another companion, one that never asked me to explain myself.
It was then that the blank page became my closest friend. It waited for me every night, unmarked and unafraid. It did not judge the darkness of my thoughts or ask me to soften them. I could tell it everything. I could confess the resentment, the envy, the exhaustion of trying to belong. The page absorbed my words and held them without recoil. Ink became proof that I existed, that my inner world had weight and shape.
I began to understand that writing was not a hobby but a form of survival. When people left, the page stayed. When voices went silent forever, the page listened. I poured my losses into sentences and watched them transform into something almost bearable. Metaphor became a bridge between my pain and the possibility of being understood. Symbolism allowed me to say what I could never speak aloud.
I crave depth because shallow water has never taught me how to swim. I crave conversations that leave marks, that change you slightly after they end. I want connection that acknowledges suffering instead of avoiding it. I want friendships that understand silence as language, grief as history, and sadness as evidence of having loved deeply. This craving has cost me people. It has also saved me from living half awake.
The solitude did not leave, but it changed. It became quieter, less cruel. I learned to sit with it, to let it speak. In the absence of others, I became a witness to myself. I documented my own survival in paragraphs and fragments. I learned that being alone does not always mean being empty. Sometimes it means being full of things no one has asked you to share yet.
I still lose people. I still grieve. The blank page is still my truest companion. But within this solitude, I have found a strange, aching honesty. I write to remember the dead, to honor the friendships that could not stay, to speak the truths that make others uncomfortable. I write because depth demands expression, and silence would kill me faster than loneliness ever could.
The poet’s tears do not rush. They gather slowly, like words circling a thought they are afraid to land on. They rise from the chest, where memory keeps its quiet archives, and they taste of all the moments that were almost spoken but never survived the air. Each tear carries a small history, a sentence unfinished, a love that learned to live in silence.
When they fall, they are not asking for mercy. They are translating feeling into something the body can release. Salt becomes language. The face becomes a page. The tear traces a line the poet could not yet write, slipping past grammar, past reason, past pride. It is a confession without audience, a prayer whispered to no one in particular.
Some tears are born from wonder—how beauty persists even after being wounded, how light still finds broken places and calls them holy. Others come heavy with grief, thick with nights that stretched too long and mornings that arrived empty-handed. These tears do not shout; they endure. They know the shape of loss and the patience of waiting.
The poet wipes their face and pretends the moment has passed, but it never does. The tears dry and move inward, settling between metaphors, breathing beneath the pauses, softening the sharp edges of truth. They become the weight behind every line, the ache that makes language honest.
For the poet’s tears are not an ending. They are the origin. They are the quiet proof that something mattered enough to break open, that the heart dared to feel deeply in a world that teaches restraint. And long after the eyes are dry, the tears remain—alive in the prose, asking the reader to feel them too.
I write poetry the way some people light candles in a dark room—not to banish the darkness, but to learn its shapes, to watch how it bends around the flame and softens its edges. There are things inside me that refuse the straight lines of sentences. They coil and wander like rivers that know where they are going but refuse to hurry. Poetry gives them room to meander, to flood, to leave their mark.
Silence has always spoken to me in color. It arrives as indigo pauses, amber echoes, bruised violets of unsaid things. I feel it humming in my ribs, tapping gently on the chest, asking to be translated. When I write, I am not inventing feeling—I am uncovering it, brushing dust from what was already breathing beneath the surface. Words become a prism, splitting a single ache into a spectrum of meaning, each shade telling its own quiet truth.
I write to bleed without injury, to confess without a courtroom, to lay my heart on the page without asking it to behave. On the page, pain becomes ink instead of weight, beauty becomes honest instead of ornamental. Every line is an act of alchemy—grief turned gold, longing turned light, memory given a second heartbeat. The past loosens its grip when it is named, when it is allowed to sing instead of haunt.
Poetry is the one place I am not asked to explain my depth, to simplify my storms, or to quiet my wonder. It allows me to be both blade and bloom, thunder and prayer. In its margins, I am free to be unfinished, contradictory, human. I can stand barefoot in my own contradictions and call it truth.
I write because time erases so much, and poetry resists erasure. It bottles moments like fireflies, small and glowing, refusing to disappear. It teaches me to listen—to the ache beneath laughter, to the hope hidden in exhaustion, to the sacredness tucked inside ordinary hours. Writing becomes a ritual, a way of kneeling before life as it is, not as I wish it to be.
For the love of tears, bloom wipe away the melancholy from your sun seek purity and treasure your crevices decorate your scars with silver chimes feel the awakening in your tarnished spirit
Blossom from your strengths and weaknesses
For the love of tears, bloom entwine your blemishes and tenacity scratch your tenderness with your nails fall in love with your endearing sympathy recognize the sparkling ornaments within
Blossom from your strengths and weaknesses
For the love of tears, bloom interweave your warmth and quiet blisters step into your discolored anguish dance with your watercolored flaws croon your lyrics of sorrow and forgiveness
I’ve kissed your mysteries with amplified eyes I’ve kissed your dead secrets with bloodshot lipstick “And now the love story takes a curve, seeing I won’t be the last and was never the first” I’ve kissed your metaphors with agony in my throat I’ve kissed your afternoons with scalding black coffee brewing “And the now the love story cuts me deep, I’m not myself and see you in my sleep” I’ve kissed your tragedies with a sea of glitter covering up your sins I’ve kissed your lying mouth with my ignorance sealed “And now the love story is coming to an end, now my life can truly begin” I’ve kissed your piano concerto with whispers fluttering in my ears I’ve kissed your villain with accusations stripped and shredded “And now the love story fades into my past, no longer do my tears have your autograph”
I’ve been walking through an electric calm with a crucifix woven into my chest. I can barely breathe but can feel tranquility gripping to my veins. I can exhale all my errors while my shadows can caress my fears. I’m gasping for my curse to vanish. I’m suffering with a small taste of compassion.
I can hear the angels crooning in my equilibrium. “I’m done am crawling, falling, and stalling because I’m ready to run. I have a light that’s more brilliant than the sun. I am done trying, dying, and crying from the destruction of my past. I am a born again miracle, white glaring spherical, with clarity sparkling in my photographs.”
I’ve been stumbling through an electric calm with vibrations whispering on my tongue. I can barely speak but feel drops of grief sliding down my throat. I can inhale all the suffering while my spine carries my turmoil. I’m letting go of the affliction. I’m dreaming for you to forgive me.
I can hear the monsters growling in my blizzard of indecisions. “I’m digging you a grave, your hesitancy and damnation will become your slaves. I’m the chain on your lilac bones, watching your heart turn into stone. I will watch you choke and convulse with a grin, I will be your unblemished sin. You will continue to swallow your glass of emptiness and feel reckless.”
I stopped searching for answers in the corridors and the empty halls. I stopped searching for whispers where my frustrations growled. I stopped searching for innocence where scars burned. I stopped searching for the lullaby on the carousel and in the carnival. I stopped searching for the exclamation point in this longwinded sentence. I stopped searching for the dreams that evaporated and the hollow river I never felt. But I struggled to find beauty in my chaos.
I stopped searching for the acknowledgement from the copycats, finger pointers, and instigators. I stopped searching for my identity within the affection of lovers and takers. I stopped searching for pieces in a whirlwind of anxiety. I stopped searching for forgiveness from acquaintances with an image. I stopped searching for devotion from perfectionists. I stopped searching for laughter in cursed temptations. I stopped searching for beliefs with the unblemished appearance. But I struggled to find harmony in my imbalance.
I stopped searching for approval from rambling critics. l stopped searching for flames with sky-scraping expectations. I stopped searching for peace where there was social combustion. I stopped searching for engagement that turned lethal. I stopped searching for supremacy within my crumbling doubt. I stopped searching for loyalty from nonbelievers. I stopped searching for kindness from callous hearts. But I struggled to find charm in my flickering character.
For you, I was your wildflower and a whisper I was drowning in your crimson flames Letters from my jagged and jaded soul burnt Free falling, lost your touch in the summer rain I was sleeping in your elastic and lucid dream a snowflake evaporating on your sleek tongue I was just a temporary fascination and wonder For you, I was your wildflower and a whisper I was descending in your artificial paradise Letters written from my heartbroken tears Slipping, invisible to your smooth-spoken ego I was growing dimmer in your nebulous eyes a blanket you never wanted to feel and cradle I was too invincible and priceless for you to hold
Between shadows and memory, one woman’s diary elucidates relationships come and gone, those who helped shape who she is from the inside out. Turning the rain into something beautiful, the opening petals of a rose now blooming.
Veteran poet Braeden Michaels crafts his seventh collection of poetry into a mold of vision. Like pages from a twisted fairy tale, he narrates using his unique poetic style and perspective, first dissecting emotion before reconstructing and reimagining each one.
I’ve seen the icicles hang in the burning silhouette I’ve been reminded of the unspoken truth caressing my frozen ghosts I’ve crawled between the spider like despair and mesmerizing sunset
Let the explanations seep and bellow Let the justifications trickle down my face Let the interpretations subside in the dusk Let the denial drip down my pale cheek I plead with my contradictions
I’ve tugged on my restlessness and uneven faith I’ve been surrounded by strangers with mind numbing tension I’ve sought out simplicity but eroded into complexity
Let the explanations seep and bellow Let the justifications trickle down my face Let the interpretations subside in the dusk Let the denial drip down my pale cheek I plead with my contradictions
I’ve drifted away from the sympathy and magnetized to the obscurity I’ve stolen hidden glances in my sleep and dream of the awakening I’ve ran from fears wrestling in the dark and disappear in the light
Let the explanations seep and bellow Let the justifications trickle down my face Let the interpretations subside in the dusk Let the denial drip down my pale cheek I plead with my contradictions
Instantly my judgements were casted. I sat at a table for three. I sat between a pessimistic dreamer and a carefree non stop smoker. I digested painted ideologies and exhaled nostalgia from my vibrating lungs. I scoffed at the handwritten kindhearted gestures. It was as if I had read them on a greeting card as a child. I tried to be engaging but was caught off guard by the long winded interrogation. Sidewinding questions, sarcastic remarks and complex theories were thrown at me like punches. I took a beating like a boxer.
Inside my head all I could hear was the regurgitating water downed clouds of systems. The formulas, schemes, and strategies plotted by short sighted leaders of this self centered generation.
I nodded my head as the clarity dispersed. I was not treated like an equal. I sat between arrogance and a rattling jaw. I barely touched my grilled California chicken. I only took a few sips of joy. I was tired of the pointing fingers and criticism of my status. I was ridiculed by plastic snakes with their golden ideals in a frame.
Inside my mind all I could do was to assess the situation. I could sense I was a pawn in their chess game. I couldn’t shake off the smirk. I coughed up their sour and misplaced words.
I sneered at their ancient glossy wisdom. I could feel the itchy tickle in my throat. I hacked up a two hour disgusting stomach aching conversation after walking away from the table.
Between shadows and memory, one woman’s diary elucidates relationships come and gone, those who helped shape who she is from the inside out. Turning the rain into something beautiful, the opening petals of a rose now blooming.
Veteran poet Braeden Michaels crafts his seventh collection of poetry into a mold of vision. Like pages from a twisted fairy tale, he narrates using his unique poetic style and perspective, first dissecting emotion before reconstructing and reimagining each one.
Bitter honey, the aftertaste is drowning the affection once pure turns into ink Disjointed and spots of spite stick to my worn-down tongue, I dwell inside
I lost my existence but found my shadow I lost my fears but found my perspective I lost my pride but found my character
Even in the despair, the calm was burning
Bitter honey, the aftermath is devastating the devotion once concrete crumbles Frail and specks of turmoil rushes down my frightened throat, I wallow inside
I lost my independence but found my direction I lost my truth but discovered the lies I lost my innocence but gained my wisdom
Even in the melancholy, the silence was light
Bitter honey, the afterthoughts are distant the tenderness once snug is crippled Cracked and traces of sorrow drip from my serenading eyelashes, I cringe inside
I lost my thirst but found my hunger I lost my laughter but found the jester within I lost my ghosts but found my guardian
The dark side is gravitating Scrambled thoughts of my reality Playing with the toys in my closet A world you could care less Claiming to know me completely You know what you want to know My efforts to shed dead skin get unnoticed I grin on the inside of these vandalized walls We share a love that wears many disguises that you refuse to see You chose to see only a few layers of me We display a miserable performance Consistently staring into my silence I can’t make you use your tongue I will never be enough or give enough You are as broken in pieces as me You don’t know how to walk away I dare you to walk away like the rest The grin expects the unexpected Can you spell the word depression Waiting for God to take me away You will understand me when I’m dead and gone And give more of yourself to another man The dark side is gravitating
Storm of Ink 