No longer will the daybreak find letters
sent in a rush to the last of the stars.
No longer will it find
a box of fallen eyelashes and wishbones
and birthday candles
and all the remnants of these lips
wishing for cancelled plans and library dates
and warm Sunday afternoons
spent on kitchen floors,
running high on shared laziness and unwashed shirts.

Darling, love’s eyes are never ours
to behold in these daylight-tainted
sheets;

so if it’s darkness that shows me the safe space,
that allows our eyes to collide like seas
if it’s neon lights and the noise of the bass that look at us —
like we’re a well-buried secret
like t h i s,
can be poetry
just underlain by permafrost,

then maybe this —
you.
and a white flag waved in the dark: a fair trade —
can be beautiful, can be enough in itself.

Then maybe it’s fine not knowing;
maybe it’s fine not being yours.

Today,
I am the emptiest space
and in the center is a black hole.
The sun, dethroned;
the planets have seen it all

and they can only witness so much.

Then again,
what happens in space is unseen by the naked eye.

nothing good happens after 2 am.

and yet here we are —
a rather curious pair of star-litten messed ups;
they say that liquid mercury and bare skin
are never a good combination
but kiss me nonetheless;
hold me nonetheless,
burn me nonetheless —

after all,
temples get burned down for the idols they host.

nothing good happens after 2 am,
but then again,
this is no place for sunsets and poems and sunday dates;
this is the apocalypse —
trapped for centuries inside our skin.
so go on,
break me — crack me open and lick the wounds,
and then maybe we'll know why persephone keeps going back to the underworld.
and then maybe we can call it love.
so go on,
kiss me until running breathless
becomes our way of breathing;
this may not be something we survive.

after all,
the daylight is an estranged lover and we are this house's walls trying to forget.

nothing good happens after 2 am,
but you will be the reason for every word, darling.
you will be the nightfall-colored eyes,
the nails all painted black
from when you dug for the dirt in my chest.
you will be the forgotten histories,
the impenetrable groves,
the coffee shop clichés,
the storms that never pass,
the nights that never last,
the secret places and warzones
and cotton dresses and fallen peonies,
and a threefold heartbreak
personified —

after all,
heartbreaks feel better when they come from you.

nothing good happens after 2 am
but t h i s already is a cautionary tale, anyway,
even without the 2 am
and tonight will be us,
crying wolf and coming undone.
tonight will be us,
tiptoeing through a minefield of mistakes,
mistakes,
and mistakes.
tell me, what's the harm in another one?

tonight will be our mayhem
and our foreboding
and our free-fall —
fatal. irreversible. majestic.
tonight will be us —
foreign lands mapping each other,
baptizing each other, darling.

and tomorrow will be ours to regret.

metaphors can't fit
in the distance
between your freckles
and petals made of words
blooming from your lips
don't look like
aphrodite,
born from the seafoam.

your eyes look nowhere
like a map of constellations
sprinkled with
my favorite phrases;
they're not even the color
of my favorite coffee,
or the ink I use
when making my blotched poems.

similes,
paradoxes,
they don't even
run in your veins
or arteries.

and yet curiously,
seeing you still feels
like reading poetry.