A FRIEND thought about a word to describe me; alive. A work in progress, an imperfect melody that rises and falls, for music inspires all I create as music’s alive and makes me the same — instruments the beating heart, lyrics what the heart represents:

How it feels to have the universe buried beneath the stone of my chest, pounding against this material self, the I that longs to fly atop gusts of light and darkness.

The heart sings not just in song but in difficult conversations and leaps of faith; the fire in her legs or the glimmer in his eye.

Put your hand on your chest.

Is the heart to the left like we’re told or the center of our body? We hardly know where all things derive, the breath and mind and imagination, the possibility for endless love.

Music’s alive because we’re alive, and that’s what I long to reveal, how the heart pumps blood into our veins and gives us more than open eyes but a soul made manifest as the sweat upon her forehead, moving without fear in a sharply shadowed room; fall for that soul. Get to know that heart, those full, downcast eyes; your heart beats faster as wings and air beneath them.

Take the risk and fly.

Can letters drifting in empty space, type on a vacant page, words not sung but read inspire welling eyes like the music in my ears?

Is this text breathing or is it the kid behind the keyboard, one who lays in bed at night awake, thinking how the fuck to face it all. Then a song, a word, the voice of a friend comes to me.

You got this homie.

You can get through anything.

Let go of the pressure of an outcome or an answer and breathe your fire.

Tell the story called five letters carved in the stone of your chest — alive.

The music guides me home under the pale light of the moon, dribbling around telephone poles with a phantom basketball like when I was a kid or when in my sheets dreaming of hooping again.

I’m dunking on trees, one particular hanging branch my nightly opposition; that’s my symphony.

Acting out the profundity of music in daily life. Don’t need a stage to embody poetry in the embrace of the prosaic, a smile or a compliment, unexpected and reflective of our will to add magic to reality, color to a rose, or to subsist in a world of grey.

Our cadence, our gait, attuned to our choice.

Find me dancin’ on the train. When I’m hurting the most the world needs it the most, for I feel its pain and it feels mine, so I dance to show the cosmos I won’t stop trying.

This path ain’t for the faint of heart. When shit gets tough I got my music. I got my workout and my words. I got my friends and my family; we good.

Don’t need to understand it — just keep asking what gives a flower color.

Get up, write your story. Gonna get there in the end doesn’t matter where I’m going. The goal is where I aim but I hope that I do stray, picking flowers kicking stones getting lost along the way.

Dancing through the street with a blue sky above, sun on my skin ain’t nothing but love; tryna keep my vibe sky high from the screen, the demons and the hate. Sometimes I can’t. That’s okay, let that shit in too.

That’s the vibe I’m on, guess I’m a romantic. Ha.

Got love for girls and love for life and love for sky for friends the fight; know that loving means losing but losing’s worth loving lose my breath in the end without love it means nothing.

I’m alive.

Read to learn what others have gone through if they can make it through smiling, we can too.

I got you.

You got me.

The heart will endure practically anything to find another that beats the same, not only through pages but as a hand to hold, a shoulder to lean upon, an open embrace where, through the smoke and skin they may touch, connect, beat as one.

That’s our music.

Beating together.

Shattering the five letters carved in the stone of our chests.