Some moments arrive softly but alter everything—quiet, glowing turning points that split our lives into a before and an after. The Way the Lantern Light Found You captures one of those enchanted instants: the hush of fate gathering, the shimmer of recognition, the gentle magic that happens when two paths finally converge. It’s lyrical and luminous, evoking that Enchanted/Lover/Renegade energy while reflecting the heart of my Songs to Stories novellas—each one built around the precise moment a life changes direction. This poem celebrates that spark, that breath, that lantern glow that says: here is where the story shifts. 💚

The Things We Learn Too Late is a meditation on the slow, intricate way life reveals its meaning—never in sudden certainties or tidy revelations, but in fragments, in overlooked details, in ordinary days that accumulate into something extraordinary only in hindsight. This poem reflects on how we spend so much of our lives searching for answers we aren’t yet ready to understand, believing meaning must be discovered rather than noticed. It’s a reminder that we are shaped not by grand moments, but by small mercies, quiet choices, and the soft unfolding of time. In the end, it suggests that life is less about mastery than attention—and that the truths art can give us are often the ones that arrive gently, piece by piece, when we finally learn how to see. 💚

We Were All New Once is a quiet meditation on the inevitability of time—how we begin our lives unmarked and full of promise, believing the future will unfurl itself in soft, radiant colours. This poem captures the ache of watching that early hope tarnish under the slow pressure of living: the way aging, repetition, disappointment, and simple survival dull the shine we once carried so effortlessly. It’s an elegy for the versions of ourselves who dreamed without hesitation, and a gentle acknowledgment of how hard it is to keep believing when the world has worn us down. Yet beneath its sorrow is a flicker of persistence—a recognition that even cracked, weathered, and weary, we still reach instinctively toward the light that shaped us. 💚

Had One Thing Gone Differently is a meditation on the staggering improbability of love—how two lives, shaped by countless choices, accidents, and near-misses, can still collide with breathtaking precision. This poem explores the fragile architecture of existence, the way a single deviation in timing or circumstance could have unravelled the entire future, and the profound gratitude that rises from recognising the one timeline in which everything aligned. It is both cosmic and intimate, an acknowledgment of how easily our paths could have diverged and how extraordinary it is that they didn’t. At its heart, this poem is a love letter to the miracle of finding your person in a world governed by chaos—and the quiet awe of knowing that, against every odd, you ended up here together. 💚

This poem, Control, reaches deep into the psychology of domination to explore the kind of “love” that is anything but loving. Though it draws on universal truths about narcissistic behaviour—the hunger for ownership, the manipulation disguised as tenderness—it is rooted firmly in the world of my fiction. The voice behind these lines belongs to Luca, a character readers will first meet in my debut novel On the Edge of After. Luca is a man who mistakes obsession for devotion, who wields empathy as a weapon, and whose desire is not to cherish, but to govern. This poem serves as a prism through which to understand him: not a monster born, but a man shaped by entitlement, fragility, and the relentless pursuit of control masquerading as love. 💚

Depression is often spoken about in metaphors—storms, shadows, sinking ships—but the lived reality is far quieter, heavier, and more invisible than most people realise. I Can’t Get Up gives voice to that crushing stillness, to the kind of exhaustion that makes even the simplest acts feel insurmountable. It’s a poem about the way joy becomes distant, how once-beloved comforts lose their colour, and how the body can feel pinned in place by a weight no one else can see. This piece doesn’t offer solutions or silver linings; instead, it offers truth—an unflinching look at the gravity of depression and the courage it takes simply to survive it. 💚

Christmas in the eighties was its own kind of magic—handmade, imperfect, and stitched together with the wide-eyed belief that beauty could hold a family in place. This poem looks back on those seasons of plastic holly, chipped gold stars, rainbow lights, and window paint that dried too quickly in the cold. It remembers the shortbreads mailed across the country, the stockings hung a little too close to danger, and the small rituals that felt enormous through a child’s gaze. But beneath the nostalgia lies a quieter truth: that sometimes the memories we polish were already cracked, that the wonder we recall was laid over something fragile and aching. This is a poem about honouring what was beautiful, acknowledging what was broken, and choosing—at last—to build something sturdier for the future. 🎄

There are moments in life when losing someone becomes the catalyst for finding ourselves—when heartbreak doesn’t just break us, but reforges us into someone stronger, braver, and truer than we ever imagined. The Version of Me You Never Met explores that electric transformation: the way we grow beyond the people who once defined us, and become the version of ourselves they never stayed long enough—or cared enough—to witness. It’s a poem steeped in reinvention and reclamation, echoing the self-forged arcs at the heart of your Songs to Stories novellas. This piece honours the woman who emerges after the storm: luminous, unshakeable, and finally her own. 💚

Softness is so often misunderstood—as weakness, as fragility, as something the world can break without consequence. But survival has never belonged exclusively to the hard or the unfeeling; it has always belonged to those who continue to rise with their tenderness intact. The Soft Animal of Me Refuses to Die is a poem about that quiet, defiant endurance—the kind that rebuilds itself in silence, that refuses to let cruelty turn it to stone, that insists on meeting each day with a vulnerable but unshakable heart. It’s a love letter to the gentleness that saved you when nothing else could. 💚

There are days when trying feels less like ambition and more like punishment — like every hope I dare to hold becomes another reason to run headlong into the same unyielding barrier. I keep pushing, keep believing, keep throwing every piece of myself at a world that refuses to shift even an inch for me. And every time I hit that wall, I lose a little more of who I was before the impact. The World Is a Wall is what it feels like to keep hoping anyway, to keep colliding with something that will never open, never let me through, never choose me back. It’s the truth of living a life where the world stands solid and unmoved, and I’m the one who breaks. 💚

There’s a specific kind of pain that comes from giving everything you have to your art and still feeling like you’re shouting into a void. I’ve worked, I’ve tried, I’ve bled for the things I create, and yet it never seems to matter. My words vanish. My effort goes unseen. My dreams stay stubbornly out of reach no matter how many hours I pour into chasing them. This poem is what it feels like to stand in that hollow place — to watch everyone else get chosen while I remain invisible, unheard, and convinced that maybe the life I want was simply never meant for me. My Dreams Are For Other People isn’t a cry for hope. It’s an honest confession of the ache that comes from trying so hard for so long, only to feel like nothing I do will ever be enough. 💚

There’s a particular kind of grief I carry — not from losing something I had, but from losing something I’ve spent my whole life trying to reach. People love to tell me that dreams come true if you work hard enough, want it badly enough, grind until there’s nothing left to give. And I have. God, I have. I’ve poured my whole self into becoming, into trying, into hoping. But nothing ever breaks open for me. Nothing ever shifts. My dreams stay exactly where they’ve always been: beautiful, distant, belonging to someone else. Dreams Never Do Come True is the truth I’ve learned the hardest way — that some people get the miracle, and some people get the ache of never being chosen, no matter how hard they fucking try. 💚

There’s a version of failure no one talks about — the kind that isn’t inspirational or character-building or secretly leading you somewhere better. The kind that doesn’t turn into a comeback story. We live in a world obsessed with motivation, obsessed with the shiny lie that hard work guarantees glory, that perseverance is a straight line toward success. But some of us try until our hands shake and still don’t make it. Some of us slip through the cracks of our own ambition and land somewhere smaller, quieter, and far less glamorous than we hoped. This poem is for that version of failure — the uncelebrated one, the one without applause or redemption — and what it means to keep living inside a life that doesn’t look anything like the dream you were promised. 💚

There are rare loves that don’t fade or settle with time, but instead deepen—layer by layer, truth by truth—revealing more beauty the closer you look. The More I Know You, the More I Love You is a celebration of that kind of love: the kind that grows fuller with every shared moment, every small discovery, every glimpse into the heart of the person who feels like home. It speaks to the impossible sweetness of loving someone more not despite knowing them deeply, but because of it. This poem honours the quiet miracle of waking up each day and realizing that love, when it’s true, only expands. 💚

Some places stay with us long after the people do—quiet, unassuming landmarks that hold echoes of who we were before life taught us how fragile forever can be. You Said Forever in a Parking Lot captures that bittersweet magic of young love: the way a single, ordinary place can become a monument to hope, heartbreak, and the soft, earnest belief that the future belonged to you both. It’s hyper-specific in the way all real memories are, yet universal enough to feel like everyone’s first almost-forever. This poem mirrors the emotional DNA of Every Road Leads Back to You and The Answer She Had to Give, inviting readers to remember their own parking-lot promises and the ghosts of futures that never came to be. 💚

This poem is about the kind of love that endures what it cannot control. The Gardener and the Storm is a meditation on care, surrender, and the quiet courage of continuing to nurture something fragile in a world that will always test its strength. It’s about loving deeply, even when you know you can’t shield what you love from every wind that howls. Because real love isn’t ownership or perfection—it’s devotion without guarantees. It’s standing in the rain with open hands, whispering to what you’ve planted: Whatever comes, I will love you anyway. 💚

There’s a unique kind of heartbreak that comes from being betrayed by someone you were supposed to be able to trust. It isn’t just pain — it’s disorientation. What Happens When I Trust You is about the ache of returning again and again to a well that never holds water, about trying to earn safety where it should have been freely given. It’s a poem about hope that keeps getting punished for existing, about love that’s been bruised into vigilance. It mourns not just the harm, but the loss of believing that trust could ever mean anything other than danger.💚

There are griefs we carry that have no clean edges—wounds shaped not by what was said, but by all the words that never came. The Words I Wish You Wrote is an exploration of that hollow ache: the longing for an apology that remains unwritten, the yearning for understanding from someone who has never learned how to give it. This poem steps into the silent space between hope and reality, where imagined tenderness becomes its own kind of burden, and where unspoken love gathers like ash in the throat. It is for anyone who has ever wished someone could become the version of themselves you needed them to be, even for a moment. 💚

So much of being human is shaped not by what we know, but by what we don’t—the invisible edges of our understanding, the blind spots we guard without meaning to. Blind to Our Own Blindness is a meditation on that quiet, universal folly: the way we mistake certainty for wisdom, the way our assumptions narrow the world even as we believe we’re grasping it fully. This poem is an invitation to humility, curiosity, and awakening—a gentle but profound reminder that true insight begins when we finally admit how much remains unseen. 💚

There are seasons in a family’s life when everything feels suspended between the ordinary and the miraculous—when joy reveals itself not as a single moment, but as the quiet accumulation of laughter, footsteps, chaos, tenderness, and the shared breath of people who have chosen one another again and again. Nothing but Promise Ahead of Us is a love letter to that sacred, bustling, ever-becoming world: a celebration of six hearts moving in unison, finding wonder in the mundane and hope in the horizon they are shaping together. This poem honours the beauty threaded through everyday living, and the boundless promise that unfolds when a family walks forward as one. 💚