you've always been the fool thinking that you made words beautiful, thinking you gave them purpose, thinking that you sculpted them with your sandpaper tongue as you carved down their imperfections
when in reality, it was the very same words that made you beautiful in my eyes, the sickly sweet delusion i've entrapped myself in like a firefly in your crystal jar of thoughts
you can't spark a fire within me with well rehearsed words and perfected lines from any old script only to leave me out to dry

She plays the guitar just off key because you promised that it wouldn't hurt to mess up once in a little while. Strangely enough, you have a hard time keeping promises but you did warn her from the start. You warned her gently with a slight smile as waves of precaution and worry resided in her eyes, you taught her the art of gently shrugging it off.  She plays the instrument  just like you taught her to before you parted ways with sights that were so familiar. Familiarity is a hand-made jacket that you shrugged off without a second thought, without a second glance. While she had just learnt the act of playing along.

On the long continuous bench in Audobon park, New Orleans, I sat watching the Siren statue. Her hand high with proud strength of her metallic near-immortality. Her cherub children sitting on bronze turtles, holding separate items of ritual in their hands, perhaps a conch, perhaps a lute. As the Siren stood on her globe, a murky green orb of a thing, there were lovers and birds, children and historians with photographic memories in their voguishly composed hands, crouching, cropping, and framing images as infinite as the bronze statues.
I wondered.
If our memories were as sound as granite, and our hearts as pure as the water that froths at a Siren’s feet, would we enjoy and enjoin our attempts, our passions, to act as our own scaffolding to our existence? Would we appreciate the small things, pleasures of love, photographs and amazement that only those bound to and cursed by time could possibly appreciate? Have you actually seen the faces of these bronze castings, once earthly golden in hue, but now terrorized with their own emblems of decay in sheen of turquoise tarnish? Those smiles of the Siren on her globe, her frolicking cherub chums with eternal infantile fists and oceanic paraphernalia, are not the smiles we should ever want to understand.
There was a breeze.
Somewhere in the leaves of an old photo album, across the globe beneath the Siren’s feet, sits an island I call home. Amongst them, the photos of the young boy who always questioned and liked answers all the same now was by and beside himself. His smile eternally saved for the memories of souls yet to come, and no less by the loving eyes of a mother, with voguishly composed hands.

she cries herself to sleep
she hurt herself to bleed
she pleaded herself to keep
she loved him just to be tricked—

and starved herself to live.

Alone in a crowd,
A drop in a cloud.
Trapped in my own mind.
I smile and laugh,
Give my autograph,
But the lights are making me blind.
Alone and surrounded,
Happiness unfounded,
But I just put up a grin.
My mask is imploding,
From people's corroding,
So I will reveal what's within.

The icy embrace of checkered tiles
sends goosebumps up my spine
The rusty handle of the sink is positioned uncomfortably
between my shoulder blades
Above me
the third incandescent bulb trembles
like a child preparing to burst into tears
I hear the routine drip of water
falling from the ****** shower head
Drugstore mascara smeared below my eyelids
With every breath
I sink lower into the puddle that engulfs me
Here, I lay
Here, I am safe
and ignorant