isn't it ironic that happiness is
something humans need?
We spend our life
looking for it.

The definition of happiness
is different for each of us.
For some people being happy
means love themselves.

For other people being happy
means being rich.
And for other people death
is their only happiness.

(m.v.a)

Maybe its just me,
but I hardly ever see poems about happiness

Is it because the bad times outweigh the good?
or do they outshine them?

Sometimes I see you looking out the window
and I know you still wait for her.
Sometimes I hear you humming, very softly, almost a whisper,
the song she always sang to you when you're about to sleep.
Sometimes I catch you touching the place behind your ears
where she always kissed you.
Sometimes you stop in your tracks when you smell her perfume.
And sometimes I can feel your hands loosening its grip when you hold mine—a fraction, an inch, barely noticeable.
And sometimes you laugh at my jokes but the glitter never reaches your eyes.
And sometimes you kiss me but it feels like a question.
And I know we're both haunted by a girl still alive,
her phantom hand pushing me
away from you.

I stopped believing my father when I was eight,
when he threw away his cigarettes and told me,
no more.
I stopped believing him when he got the last beer
out of the fridge and told me,
never again.

The earth is getting warmer,
the ice are melting,
the polar bears are endangered,
mermaids are not real,
my dad's never getting clean,
you'll never drive two hours to bring me Butterfingers,
you'll never listen to the songs I send you,
you don't know my middle name,
I feel like I have to beg to be with you,
you'll never read this poem because it's so tiny and insignificant,
and my heart's going to break any day now
but I'd still ask you to pick up the pieces for me.

I watched my father scrunch his eyebrows together
whenever my mother said something he didn't like,
his impatience seeping through his dark skin,
apparent in the way he turned his body away
as if he wanted to run from all this
but he's trapped now, trapped forever.
I listened as my mother told me she did not want to stay
and my brother and I are the only things anchoring her unto this godforsaken house
of peeling white paint and crumbling walls and endless shouts and burning words.
I watched them hold each other when things got tough
and I knew it wasn't because of love—
it was because they were the nearest things to each other.
At a very young age I knew love was something that dissolves,
a flower you water everyday,
a story you never stop writing,
And some people, they don't know,
that they have stopped watering,
and they're running out of ink, only on page 3.
Little girl me knew.
Big girl me continues to watch it unfold,
dead petals in their hair
and dark ink between their fingers—
dry