I’m still alive!! I hardly check this account anymore. I’ve been studying abroad in New Zealand, growing and changing and healing a lot. I have new dreams now to use my story as a force of hope and healing... to turn my blog into a website, make videos, and even do public speaking one day and write a book?! I’m crazy about healing and empowerment and I love talking about how we can rethink shit and see things differently, from mental health to religion to cycles of stigma to love to how we see our bodies etc. :)

I don’t write poetry these days, but I write on my blog a ton about just those topics. Coming back to this blog makes me want to start again though. We’ll see!

I’ve never forgotten Pray to Me Instead and I still harbor hopes of turning it into a mini book one day 💕

You can keep up with me on Insta/Facebook under Max Goes Godless, at @max-swell, or at maxgoesgodless.com!

For Those Who Left

It’s a hard road, I know, hammered with moonlight and long shadowed nights. All this way, walking, stumbling, keeping pace with patience and fear and loss and thrill and one ravenous hunger for life pounding in your temple, but at least, unlike all you had to leave behind and were left behind by, they were still yours. Painful and gorgeous as your own heartbeat. You’ve made a home for yourself here. And it has been sour as lemon, sweet as honey, priceless as moonlight and costly as breath to begin to feel it. At last. All the death that had to fold inside out into life, life, life, life, life, life, like some strange and startling origami. All the loss that ripened to growth, recovery, transformation, reincarnation week after week after week.

And sometimes it still hurts. Aches like thirst, to settle into the new truth. To fight for it too, your hands going raw, your back shrieking, to earn it. But still there is something pleasant in the difficulty. Of holding it all and saying this is mine and so much (not all) but so much I made with these hands. Here. To be able to point to the moments you forged your heart.

I know, sometimes the life you were locked in calls to you, like an ancient echo you heard when you had a different name, and suddenly it drowns your ears, makes you blind with all you lost. but you open your eyes. Roll over and notice the tide of light, golden and alive on the windowsill, frank and warm as the cheek of the loved  (sometimes boy) (sometimes girl) sleeping next to you.

This light, like you, was not easy in coming. Imagine the lightyears, the lengths and depths of cold and utter darkness it must have crossed to come to rest here on your windowsill, curving up your hips and striping your palm. Feel how warm it is. Luxurious. The silken legacy of an expired star. Something had to die to make this light. And it had to lose its home to find one here, in the quiet of this morning, a secret between you and the whole world. Light does not look back. And for all its travels, here it is. Gilded. At rest. At home. To stay.

What are you guys reading? Writing? I wanna know! Tell me what’s been inspiring you. Very merry Christmas and Festivus, a happy happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Solstice, to all who celebrate and a great winter to the rest of us 🎄🍷🍋