Where is your home, little one?
Are you lost?
It’s ok. Take my hand. I’ll lead you to the promised land.
Do you need a home, somewhere to stay?
A place where you know, you’ll always be safe?
What is home?
A feeling or place?
Come with me, we’ll find it together, wherever it may be.
Little by little you see the change.
Electricity flows through your limbs, energy pulses through your muscles awakening everything that had been dormant for too long.
With every jab and every thrust you shake off the atrophy of stiff joints and learn to move again.
Focus on yourself in the mirror don’t look to your right or to your left.
They’re not why you’re here.
They’re not why you power through.
Their body is not your body.
Their goals are not your goals.
It hurts less today than it did last week. Focus on that.
Focus on the fact that you can do more than you did two months ago.
Don’t quit.
Don’t stop.
Don’t give up.
Every day you get a little bit stronger.
Every day is a new victory.
When cooking you measure spices with your heart not with a tablespoon.
Because a recipe isn’t law but a guide to follow as you please.
The death toll is 45 on a Monday morning.
Men, women, children– someone’s baby who isn’t coming home again.
Did you tell him you love him before he went out that door?
Mami, le diste la bendicion?
It’s not a terrorist attack or natural disaster, it’s just another month gone by in Chicago.
These are the things you read when scrolling through pictures of puppies and reports about winning teams.
Something must be done!
Hot air and empty promises.
Men in suits telling me how we should live,
But bullets speak louder than words.
Why are we killing each other?
Will I ever know the desperation that leads me to pull a gun on my neighbor?
The anger?
The rage?
Don’t speak to me about the problem with gun violence when you have no solution.
Speak to me with opportunity and art and beauty.
Speak to me with options instead of liquor stores on every corner.
Speak to me with playgrounds for our children instead of empty lots and chain link fences.
Until then don’t talk to me about a problem like I’m not drowning in the tears of broken mothers.
We are not well, you and I.
Could be why you’re having a conversation with yourself in the mirror.
You’ve been crying at your desk again.
You almost cried at lunch.
You are not fine.
Why are you so hard to love?
Why aren’t you like the other girls?
“Is it raining there?”
No. You lie
“Did you walk the dog?”
Yes. Another lie.
“Are you going to sleep?”
Yes. You spare him the truth of you laying here too apathetic to even want to get up to relieve yourself. You move because even you aren’t that low.
You go out eventually. It’s raining, but you’re too far gone to care.
The rain makes you feel something and that’s better than nothing– even if it’s purely sensory.
Rain is water. Water is wet. You are now wet.
The dog is wet. The dog now smells.
You feel nothing, but that you are slowly getting wetter.
So you walk with the dog trotting besides you, the two of you drowning in April showers.
The Secret Life of Pandas 