Across her sweatshirt, ninety-nine names
stitched like constellations —a lover finds
a hundred reasons to say why he loves you.

A slogan turned into scripture, she wears
it close to her chest; words sweating with her
on the mattress, to wait patiently, following
all the directions from the map of her heart.

I’ll mark the landscape, paint portraits of her
in my mind’s eye —learning the grammar
of her body, and the rules of her orientation.

Inside her, every detail is an interior design,
yet all of it points outward towards me.
She proves me down to earth, grounded
by the gravity of her presence.

Her breath is thick; honest words grazing
the neck like prayer; and in silence, our eyes
speak the sentences our lips can’t form.

Love repeats itself, a devotion like unanswered
prayers, whispered night after night; to find
a surrender that completes both sides of us.

I found my Hundredth Reason.

Tears for makeup – brushing possibilities
across the mirror of morning, peeling blessings
under the sunlight of a warm prayer.

Feet sweat inside the slippers of comfort,
even rest feels restless; slipping words
into the day just to deafen my small defeats.

Winter battlefields – I never learned how
to march in snow, waiting instead for March
flowers to break through frost, for warmth
to unclench the ground and teach my steps
to bloom again.

Water wraps my soul, drowning my heart –
my teeth chatter like crushed ice, dreams
circling like planes overhead.

"Don’t miss your flight plan," I whisper.
Ninety-nine departures, over one hundred
days of tears until that final arrival.

So when I finally close the shutters of my eyes,
I'll wear them as makeup once more – believing
the face of tomorrow might hold a smile
that feels real in reality.

Would you please excuse my grammar —
I'm only trying to caption my heart
like an Instagramer; chasing moments
that vanish in an instant matter.

When and where you eventually find
yourself —no other place will really matter.
We are fragile as glass, fingers made of dreams
swiping the screen, touching reflections that
almost feel too real.

But I’ll never be younger than the day
all my dreams began. Still, I stay punctual —
marking time in commas, pausing in semicolons,
leaving ellipses for the stories I wasn’t ready to tell.

Question marks kept me up at night; exclamation
marks made me bold enough to try. And the older
version of me scrolling through this feed of years,
may have the joy of ending it all with a single,
quiet full stop.

I choke my vape,
lungs burning, multitudes
of tears droning — bees,
hummingbirds, all their
beauty spilling nectar...
                          
I’ll never taste it.

If this is a song,
it’s an instrument playing
itself, strung out on instincts,
but struck without melody.

And still—
this feeling ******* stinks.

He sits on the edge of the bed;
tears rolling, no reason.
             Not sad —
                   just leaking.

Hand across his face,
sniffs, straightens his back.
         Deep breath —
                               Done!

He moves on,
like it never happened at all.

“Never mind,” he says,
                      “that’s just life.”

My breath, light as feather, words like dust—find it best
not to speak too much, lest I seem soft as a feather duster.
Dreams of a perfect body, shadowed by many premonitions,
permissions granted only by the mountains where I took life
by the heel—miswriting heal, and climbing that endless hill
toward closure.

I saw a fish in a teardrop, a sad smile crossing its face; and it
weighed the world on its scales. The river’s currents glistened
with depression— so I pushed upstream, crying a mountain’s
worth of water.

I fought not to wash myself away, lying beneath it all, while
an angel kissed my twisted hair; locked my thoughts in place.
Perfectly ready to die, dancing to a song of reoccurring suicide,
a melody only I could hear. Must entail the full act of dying,
feel the strings beneath your fingers— chords played in secret,
as if David himself taught me the strum. To be an instrument
to a horn, to hone your skills, to feel like a big man someday.

Think of this the next time someone says, “Yeah, I’m okay.”
So much hidden, beneath that quiet syllable, an entire ocean
of grief swallowed in one breath.

A relationship’s anchor— we could be falling in love or sinking
down, holding on for far too long, too shy to step fully into the
moment, being too hesitant to taste a worthwhile experience.
So awkward in time— yet the stars in a smile still flicker, asking
for a space in time, a little corner of the universe to stretch this
love beyond its natural season.

But seasonal heartbreaks are just another episode, and you
know how it goes— new loves spring up, and blossoming
overnight, only to end in snow.

We cling to them in desperation, but strange terrain prevails
dismay; hard to walk steady as every step sinks into the cold.
And still we rush— rushing to fall in love, slipping through
the snow, hoping this time the anchor holds, hoping this time
we don’t drown.

Where will the anchor fall down to?