I missed your skin
when it was green;
you called yourself
the queen of east.
I noticed
you tattooed my face
in ink behind
your eyelids now.
Your slippers red
and made of gems.
You clicked them twice
and wished for me.
They brought you to
a broken world;
you forced yourself
to call it home.
You took the rubies
off your feet
and made a necklace
just for me.
Toss the necklace
to the lake;
its gems are shattered
glass to me.
You are born
a Capricorn,
but never saw
a mountain range -
Too fragile
of a mountain goat
to climb a single hill
ever since
tornadoes came
to smash your soul
and **** your life.
Stare at moons
that visits days
and draws those who
forget to yawn.
Mar 7, 2016
Mar 7, 2016 at 6:45 PM UTC
They beleaguered me
until my dreams
and my lies
conflated
in the way gravity
used to be the same thing
as radiation,
but the dalliance
of the fundamental forces
was nothing
compared to the eternal love affair
between what I wanted
and what I pretended to have
Feb 21, 2016
Feb 21, 2016 at 1:33 PM UTC
If I would want to paint my life
in colors more than black and white,
then you would go
and catch a rainbow for me.
Only I
will ever know
where you learned
the art of catching colors.
You never told
a single soul,
but I can see
the truth you hold:
I know you once
were staring down
the rainbow that acts as a bridge to Heaven.
I know you once
had stagnant kaleidoscopes behind your eyes
whose beads were just bits of your own earth.
Dear, I hope you learn
that I do not want your kind of rainbow
with emo bands and sleeping pills,
with leaping from the window sills;
I do not want to see the world
through a foggy veil I believe is truth,
so when I'm ready to paint my life
in colors more than black and white,
I shall not turn to you,
but to the smoky place
that acts as a bridge to Hell.
Feb 9, 2016
Feb 9, 2016 at 6:56 PM UTC
You’re the moon
and I’m the sun,
chasing you around the world,
trying to touch you with light,
while you wish to be among the stars beside you
that steal your spotlight,
but I promise you,
stars burn out and only come out at night.
I too will burn out
and then I will fade
so I’ll be just like you,
a dense rock floating through nothingness
until we join a collapsing cloud of solar dust.
Since we’re both denser than gas,
we might become stars –
even the same one –
but that could take eternity
and the universe might have expanded by then
to the point where it’s too cold for stars.
I cannot calculate the probability of meeting you again,
but right now,
you’re right here
and I’m chasing you around the world,
trying to touch you with light.
Jan 29, 2016
Jan 29, 2016 at 9:42 AM UTC
Watch the trepidation in the swinging of a chandelier,
as its candles choreograph their own silhouettes
on the pallid walls
to the beat of the creaking ceiling.
When the roof caves in,
the walls will stop being a dance floor to ghostly shadows,
the chandelier will crash to the table,
and the song of a rusty, trepid chain will end.
You will have learn to let yourself waltz
to the music in your own head
and you will have to learn let others watch you
because you are a fire, not a ghost
and you do not belong in the shadows you create
when you’re secretly making your pain into art.
Jan 23, 2016
Jan 23, 2016 at 10:56 PM UTC
Out of all the people I have ever encountered, only you relentlessly make veiled influxes in my creations, as I’m subconsciously thinking about your reaction in everything I make and I suppose I am imagining you will someday read this, admire my art, and describe how brilliant I am after staring at my math homework.
No, my sweet companion, I am not as brilliant as you dreamed. I am neither talented nor creative. I am simply a girl with too much time since I have forgotten my purpose or saw I had none. I lost a sense of what I should do with myself when they said I wasn’t reaching expectations. Don’t call me smart; have no expectations lest anxiety starts explaining the ways of failure.
There are three 360 degrees in a clock and 365 days. I must find the correlation, as I speak in numbers and calculate in sentences. Everything has an equation to graph in four dimensions, so math is all I see.
You are already a star that burnt out and became a black hole with infinite gravity. Light cannot find a way of resisting you and I get why you prefer light to my dust a million light years away that will turn into a star but not in my lifetime.
Dream about me and watch solar systems rotate you. You are the center of everything in a space without a center. You **** in particles that might come a different black hole as long as you don’t violate the laws of causality.
No, my dear, you are the brilliant one that discovered how to throw a ball of light in the air and watch it come back to you so that you can catch it and throw it up again. You are the one endlessly collapsing and imploding. Life cannot survive inside you only partly because you forgot symbiosis. You are breaking all the rules and nothing can stop you until we see what happens when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object. Only another light-sucking creature will get you to talk and I am a cloud determined to become a black hole so that we can create a binary system of rotating giants of darkness.
I promise that I will catch up to you, but today, I can only write about you with abstract words and too many dead metaphors – because that is all you ever were to yourself – as I imagine you reading my work and editing my math homework that never needed editing. I promise I will meet you again somewhere in this cold and lonely universe. I promise that you are not alone and you can give a hint of you hide within your dark horizon. I will give up forever to find you.
Jan 18, 2016
Jan 18, 2016 at 7:41 PM UTC
He does not see it,
but we were more than a picture can ever capture
because light rays don't bounce off our bodies
in the way people expected it to:
We never manage to absorb any light
and the photons just sprung right off our skin,
so we displayed excess radiance
and that's why they called us a star.
We aren't stars, not anymore,
we’re just two pathetic faces with nothing to say
on the art of avoiding the hypnotic gestures of
the golden pendulums on a grandfather clock.
Jan 18, 2016
Jan 18, 2016 at 7:11 PM UTC
Together, we springtime saunter through a busy cities with pink dancers and naked cowboys cluttering the street. The buildings are towering above us, but we don’t bother looking that high; we maintain straight gazes towards ordinary people. Lady liberty waves to us and expresses fondness towards our interlocked fingers. He casually wonders how sharp the spokes are on her crown and how tall the real statue stands.
He learned to love himself through me and someone called that misandry. It was utterly absurd so I paid her no heed, but it made him realize where he’d go if I broke him. “I promise I won't break your heart,” I say, but he tells me, “You can’t know that .” He doesn’t yet know that I always keep my promises. He doesn’t yet know that if anyone has to fear a broken heart, it’s me. When he learns to spin in pulsing neutron stars and sees that I am but a sad cloud of collapsing solar dust, he might decide he would prefer to love something a little more radiant than I am.
“Stars burn out,” I think, “and solar dust can turn into a galaxy one day.”
Together, we lie on crispy summer grass that brushes our spine as the sun tickles our collarbones. Our ribs ache from laughter and I know I belong to him as the stars belong to the sky. “I’m glad we got to spend much of vacation together,” he says. I mutely agree because I have no cliche metaphor to contribute. I just try to stare at the sun, convinced that it wouldn’t damage my eyes because I didn’t go blind the last time I tried. “Youth is invincible,” I finally say and I let him ponder what I mean until he puts it in the back of his mind with a long list of phrases I uttered to him, all of them just short of poetic. Still, I know he plans to write a song out all the babble he thinks I mean.
He grabs my hand and traces circles around my knuckles. We’re only sixteen, but he thinks that if people aged backwards, teenagers would realize they were wrong when they were parents, so he doesn’t think high school love is insignificant. They told us we’re in our prime, but he doesn’t think people in their prime are always staring at sharp objects and read Ecclesiastes for fun.
“The others are wrong,” I think, “it can only possibly get better from here; it definitely can’t get any worse.”
Together, we watch as colorful nature is scattered across the sidewalk and piles up in the road in mountains of autumn. Squirrels gather the acorns that we are trying not to step on since we are barefoot. You can’t see the mud on his feet because his skin is so dark.
We discuss how the universe is a place too vast to fit within our logical comprehension, too vast to understand. We both know that infinity isn’t something to grasp, even if physics said it must exist. Since we’re just a little pinprick in a universe we’ll never draw on a finite piece of paper, we see we’re lonely people staring at lonely stars. “All we can do is hope that company of others will prevent all this loneliness from consuming us all,” he says and I’m impressed, so I say, “I’ve learned that it is possible to find the right company.” He smiles because he thinks I mean him, and maybe I do.
“I love him,” I think, “and I’m lucky that he somehow loves me too, even if we can’t understand love.”
Together, we jog to the place where the moonlight shimmers in melodic zigzags over the bronzing sea and the night is thinner than it is in the city of a million lights. Our jaws are clenched because breathing heavily in the cold is painful to our chins. He tells me secrets and the words empty from his throat into the atmosphere, where the water in his breath freezes into the night. “You’re a dragon,” I say, but I mean, “Winter is turning your voice to smoke.” As always, he doesn’t understand what I mean, but I have learned not to worry about it. He says, “You’re also a dragon,” and he means, “We have a lot in common.” I’m sorry that he doesn’t understand me the way I’ve learned to understand him.
He litters the air with secretive water droplets; the night gets thicker with his words. I want to tell him that I’ve never cared about a person more than I care for him, but I’ve learned to say nothing explicitly, because the art of finding metaphors in the simplicity of meaningless chatter is what convinced me that he cares about me.
“He can play the same treasure hunt that I played,” I think, “and when he wins, he’ll be the happiest person in the world.”
Jan 18, 2016
Jan 18, 2016 at 3:53 PM UTC
I call myself a bell-flower,
as you cannot hear my tremulous chime
and I am decorated in purple and blue blossoms
on the only home that holds me tight
though I still want to crawl out of it
and grow up in someone else’s
Jan 18, 2016
Jan 18, 2016 at 3:43 PM UTC
I call to you in whispers
when I flick off the lights
and turn my blankets into a cocoon.
Maybe you’ll hear me one day.
If not, at least I can say that I wanted to find you
and my hands that brush my lips to pull my blanket towards my face
will tell you the same story –
a night does not go by that I don’t whisper to you.
The shadows expect it of me these days;
they wait to hear me call to you
and artfully etch my words with inkless golden feathers
onto my bedroom walls.
Jan 18, 2016
Jan 18, 2016 at 3:28 PM UTC