What Could You Have If You Let Yourself Dream? If You Didn’t Squash Anything That Shone Under That

A mermaid is born when a heart is buried, deep in the trenches of the blue sea. A mermaid coveting motherhood need only snatch a sailor’s heart and offer it to the seabed, and within hours, her baby girl will rise from the sand and into her arms. What happens, though, when a mermaid steals the heart of another mermaid? How will the others forgive a murder, even if it is done out of love?

-Diary of a Siren

I don’t feel anything anymore. I don’t know if I miss it or not. It can be nice being withdrawn from the world, until is isn’t.

You can run away from reality, and shield yourself from introspection, but in the corner of your eye your life is always happening.

What is love but the desire to feel sunlight through their skin. And hold there.

Share with me your shame, distill your weakness so that I may drink it like wine. Your secrets are precious to me, nothing shocks a man like me.

I will be myself, and if the world rejects that then I will reject the world, and make my own place. I will not be lonely there, because I know there are others just like me, struggling to reconcile the desire to belong and the desire to be.

These javelins, these poles sharp at their tips that cascade through me as water, do they hold me up or affix me to the ground?

Would my body be strong enough to stand without them? Would I still know how? The stacking of the feet, the ankles, and the calves. The shuffling against dirt and grain to the steady rhythm of progress.

There is something so shameful in trying. In putting forth the effort out in the open where the onlookers look and dig their forks into my darlings. My creation dies in the end, regardless. Whether they relish every morsel or idly masticate while their eyes are drawn to the street walkers, just like all that came before her, my idea is eaten. And I am left alone to wonder if a piece of my soul had any flavor worth talking about.

It’s easier to make fun of something than to try it in earnest. How many non-artists laugh at novices, and fear to even look at their instrument, dull pencils neglected in their drawers yearning really for paper.

On the Photos from Gaza

She screams, but her mother can't hear her. She's only inches away. But the soft, floral blanket caked with dust is heavier than the broken concrete that used to be home, than the missiles that stretch out cold metal arms to dismember and destroy, than the guns young men tote in old men's wars. It holds her mother's dead body in a vice-grip, but there is no grip tighter than the girl's on the blanket. She screams harder. She wants nothing else than to lift the veil, between life and death, between her and her mother, but it is too heavy. It is too heavy for a little girl who only wants to be with her mother.

Loving cruel people doesn’t change who they are. It’s like holding a morning star to your chest hoping it’ll become smooth. It just leaves you bleeding.