in a cosmically laughable accident,
he is born in disorder, created in discord
sent off in a journey he does not understand
but he is already on his way

he can’t stop spinning, unbalanced, unsteady
but there is a path they tell him to take, and
there is a destination he has to reach, and so
he must join the race

and when he tries to breathe like they ask him to,
he suffocates in his own atmosphere,
and everything that once lived within the wells
and dwelled within the rafters,
they had to leave.

but he knows he will never be as beautiful
as the ones who mark the darkness in their
unending pursuit, he will never be as swift,
he will never be angled right, he is too slow
and too small and too weak and

as he misses his entry into orbit,
he realises he never knew why he was born,
nor why he lived, nor why he was dying, but he
hopes that if they couldn’t notice a dying star,
perhaps they might at least remember its absence

and maybe, just maybe, they’d give him a name.

I watch as the droplet eases itself
down from the wound, into a strip of paper,
scarlet on crimson. some might call it a stain,
but this is no mistake, I will fold myself
in, like blush on cheek, I will make it look real.

is it pathetic to imitate what we can never achieve?
the night sky gloats in silent mockery. the trail of
her dress drags along my dry eyes, and she burns
a hole for every jewel I cannot reach.

is it a sin to covet a sin? my fingers run along
the grooves of my carved pupils, and I can't
remember anything aside from the warmth
of a star in another orbit.

I fold my three hundred and fifty second paper star.
Does the moon believe that these are her children too?
Or are my paper cuts for naught? One day, I know
the paper will be skin and the star will be a sun.

but until then I will bleed, and until then
I will have to suffice with a constellation of scars
that glow in the dark on my ceiling.

she covers my eyes, and not even light
dares to slip through her fingers.
she tells me to look harder, deeper
and she whispers sweet everythings
and suddenly the void she has gifted me
seeps through my eyelids and
leaks into my sockets, and I see
everything I have ever wanted.

she holds my hand like no one else has,
palm to palm, and she whispers empty rhythms,
psalm to psalm, the ghost of a dream resting
its head against my chest, bated breath,
vapours of impossibility, tickling, fooling me.
her fingertips bite into the soft flesh, but
the only pain I feel is her/my hand around my/her neck.

when illusions collide, do they fall further into delusion?
or are they decapitated by reality?

they call her helplessness,
I call her finality,
and she tells me she is mine,
but I know I am hers.

they tell me to put a band-aid over it
but I've long been accustomed to *******
the blood from its source, pain into stomach,
I stomach the pain

byproducts of observation, disgust and fear
meted out like a rush of an open wound
but I pay no mind, I have my own tears to deal with
and I patch it up and sew my hairs into knots
braided into false closure, just to stop the loss

but nothing I do can stop the surge,
in every breath I lose the will
with no knot nor braid, I've neither fought nor prayed,
still the blood keeps flowing, and I just keep swallowing

skin like plaster like plaster to skin,
a growing clot can only be a dam so strong
the iron lungs heave, and I exhale a gale of rust
but I shall not cease moving, no matter how much blood I've lost