A Season of Winter

  Literature)  Sacrifice. Time is sacrifice. Action is sacrifice. Love is sacrifice. Where does it stop? At relocation? Cold friendship? A loss of self? How much sacrifice is enough to secure your place in their life? What else do you have to lose? A question with an answer, but never the right one. It's not a matter of what  you sacrifice. It's whether or not that sacrifice is worth  it.  To light the altar of your every aspiration ablaze and call it "love" is vain. This is but the romanticized pain we inflict upon ourselves just to prove our feelings are real.  But the truth is that an empire built on oblation, an offering to the gods of our sentimentalism, is an empire that burns all the same. Empire: I'll trade my heart for an empire just to see it burn. From so far, you painted me a liar. I guess I never learned. I let my guard down to pretty serpents with lying eyes and venomous lips. They hide like scars and hang from my neck like a necklace laced wi...

Literature)  Hands are the thieves of innocence. Breath is but a forewarning, like the hiss of a snake, or the poise of a scorpion. This kind of pain, loss- not of another, but of yourself, is unlike any I've known. The following piece from Florilegium  recounts the moment that I first felt weak. The violation of my body with no room to breathe, let alone fight. In the moment his prurience weighed on me like a secret, I thought to myself, This is how I keep a friend.   This Is How I Keep A Friend: Being lonely made me desperate and you used it to your advantage. My discomfort made you uncomfortable, I felt bad for being used. I apologized, said it was my fault because maybe it was. I didn't know pain until I met you. I won't cry over you, I couldn't even if I wanted to. I'll keep those tears for when it gets better. But you marked my skin with an invisible tattoo of a stranger's handprint and made it permanent. I didn't know pain until I met you. Your hands,...

  Literature)  Lonely Nights (Florilegium) is the first album I wrote with a complete thirteen song set. These songs were, at a time, my lifeline. I consider this album to be my most vulnerable even still. No aesthetic comes close to the lonesome warrior I embodied writing Lonely Nights, particularly the song  Lifeline. Lifeline: A good life has some bad days. Be patient and things will change. So I wait. I'm so fucking desperate, patience is pointless. Every day feels the same; I go through the same motions, I make the same mistakes. It's the same heartbreak. I hate feeling like I'm replaceable  in everyone's life.  I hate that I waste my time  on lonely nights with no lifeline.  I meet someone, get my hopes up. He says he wants me but it doesn't mean much coming from a guy that's just looking for fun. I want real love as gentle as moonlight. Pure like the sunrise, a breath of fresh air. Tell me you care, if you cared, you'd stay. Take your suppl...