They say inheritance is genetics, wealth, and sickness. I inherited self-annihilation. I was born dead, spent my teenage years trying to get better, relapsed time and again. I turned thirty and thought to myself: seriously? Putting a "3" in front of my age felt like I had cheated death, like I was in a movie directed by someone who hated me, and sought revenge.

Other people are strange to me. Or I should say, more specifically, healthy people are strange to me. My mind and my body are separate, always have been. Life seems easy for the healthy, they drink their coffee and go to work and have political opinions in a world that they are going to spend, maximum, ten decades in.

How morbid, you're thinking. I wonder if these same people have watched a body being fed into a crematorium. People like to make up fantasies like "the Phoenix rising from the ashes," as if somehow death can be reversed, but when I watched the body being incinerated, to me, it seemed pretty final.

People are so scared of death, and dying. You can't even say it; it's a dirty word, like menopause, or mental illness. Both facts of human existence. Better to doom scroll and shake our fists at rage-bait on Twitter and Instagram.

I am weary of people who drink their coffee and go to their soul-crushing jobs that don't pay rent or put food on the table and don't question their existence. How do they do it?

All I can do is rise up, every day, like everyone else, until that day ceases to come, and I learn if I am a Phoenix, after all.

We live to heal ourselves

Free ourselves of the weight

Others forced us to carry

At the end our soul to release

Into the universe

Into the unknown

To be a phoenix is to be reborn

Through the flames

Only seen so close in the deepest depth of Hell

Now being seen in your eyes

On your body

A fresh start

A new body

Same soul

A soul that stays

To a body reborn

Limbs fragile,

Bones hallow

Yet a mind as strong as a God

In the beginning there was ash.

Tough skin, nails on concrete,

Death only comes when there is nothing left.

And there was nothing left of me.

But one day the sun came blazing through my bedroom window.

My shell of iron melted and all that was left was the ashes of who I used to be.

I thought that would be the end.

Then evening came,

cooled my resolve,

and I made love with the beautiful possibility

that I could be something.

And suddenly there was a tomorrow for me after all.

Ashes in my bed, iron in the morning. Feathers fluttering from my window.

Was it all a dream?

For this body that was “mine” feels brand new. As if I have never seen the birth mark on my left elbow.

That my eyes, deep blue with white flecks, “like waves crashing”, is an ocean that I only just found.

An impossibly ordinary yet extraordinary miracle that I have been here all along. These marks that stretch across skin with scars, wrinkles and dimples are still here, despite it all.

Ashes from the beginning maybe ashes in the end.

Who knows?

But I do plan to go out blazing, with all that I have,

With all that I am.

I've been born from a blaze and to ash i shall return

but do not recall that which I was before

I do not know if i am a Holy Light or Hellish Inferno

I do not know if i am young or if i am old

They gaze upon my beauty, yet do not know the pain of my discoveries

I was here before you saw me burn

and i will be here after you've been consumed in a blaze

that which I ignite, or that which the Phoenix i was before did

Its the pressure not the heat

That's the misconception

When youre smothered beneath the embers

You quickly learn that lesson

The pain is unfathomable

And the result is called a myth

Nobody knew me before

So whats it matter if they believe i exist

My only sustenance oxygen

To feed my feathered flare

A reward or a punishment

I question with a weathered glare

But what is, happens to be

My history now feels profane

When I changed so did every memory

And my present is unimaginable pain

The burn isnt for show

Its deep and it hurts

Graceful i may appear

But ive never felt worse

Ive tried to end it

Flown high and dove deep

But I can't run from this

I cant hide from me

I close my eyes tight

For a second to rest

This feels like the same heat

That used to burn in my chest

Its consumed me fully

Im feeling all dried up

To rise out of the ashes

Isn't supposed to be fucked

River dark and dreary running swiftly

Boat long rickety floating freely adrift

Smokes moldering hot cherry fire burning

Skin sizzling scorching coals fire stings

Old woman telling this is deaths shore

The signs awaken the fire in her soul

She gives a warning beware of flames

Make sure to see the light inside

Free your heart from your darkness

It was forever gone when eyes open

dream still exists in your minds eye

kissing the flame inside your soul

No more smoke your body free

Breathing the fresh breeze of life

The phoenix wings wrapped and embroidered into a cross.

A last gasp,a breath that never became.

And then there was one.

A thief steals the show,a rehearsal on the brink of damnation.

Remember me when I collide with dirt and debris from the ashes of this burning pit.

It is finished,til I return to carry you home,and lay you into the soil.

Like a flower that bends and stretches itself towards a broken halo that I wear as a crown.

A king is born From a pauper robed in crimson thorns from a dead rose.

Ever night abv. Every day. I work. I fade away and sleep. Late nights I eat, then sleep, at three. Like a phoenix I be...come. New-ish chugging water to feed, a clean blood. Till attack it again with abv. It's me. Judge, hate, seeth, guarantee I hardly believe, you live. I give myself to tall boy unequivocally, next day rise PHOENIKALIVIQUALY.