How can you pronounce a passion you’ve never participated in
Love is a foreign dialect I haven’t mastered yetIt’s hard to conjugate compassion, when my vocab has been rooted in absence
My emotions get stuck in the back of my throat like an R i can’t roll

My family and I don’t speak the same language.
Love is the empty pot on my grandmother’s stove after sunday dinner
It’s the song me and my grandfather sing on roadtrips
It’s my mother not knowing how to say it consistently
My father stays out of my life, and i’m starting to think that’s love too

I never write about love
Don’t really know how

Thought giving love was to be perfect instead of a person
To be small enough to fit inside of someone’s projection
I was downbad
Requesting love from those who ain’t even got it
pleading to people to people please

Had people who took the parts of me they wanted to see then told me they loved me

But maybe that is love
Maybe I’m the mirror that doesn’t turn people away
The one that doesn’t break when they scream into it
The love language that spoke to me the most was silence
Acceptance
Is practiced more than spoken
Words without action is just imagination
I loved people for what they said they could do before they did it

Attachments and connections are not the same thing
One is the fear of being apart
and the other is knowing you’ll always be together
I never learned the difference

But My friends, they put the home in homie
I used to be scared to love people.
“I love you” always felt like a promise,
the only way to love someone is forever,

So what happens, when the human parts of our being get tired of growing together?

We are not stationary life forces, we are forces of life starved in states of stagnancy,
We move.
We change.
We don’t always need the same people present in every present.

even so,
my teammates
bring a smile to my soul
bearing my shadows be met with bear hugs
i seen the meanest mug
to anyone disrespecting me and mines

I show my loved ones they’re loved ones
When they ask me how I’m doing
and I tell the truth
even though it feels like trying to cough up a mountain
Blood may be thicker than water
But it isn’t stronger than ink
Immortalized my friends in pens and captured them without confinement

i got wealth in emotional health
Got a group of people worth staying on this planet with
Who share food when you don’t got it like that
Fill each other’s cups till they overflow
My homies know spending time alone
is how i love myself
know we can grow closer or grow apart
As long as we still grow

& we don’t all gotta go together, to grow together
a persons journey to self discovery does not mean I’m losing them,
it means they’re finding themselves, that our fondness for familiar faces is a form of fear, one day we all must travel far away

I thought I found my soul tribe until I realized my tribe was a part of my soul, & every person I meet is never separate from me but an extension of me,
experiencing life in different phases, & places

& love never leaves

even when people do