There is no manual for love
That's what hurts the ******* most
I don't know anything
Why I'm here
What I'm doing
The steps to make this all alright
I cannot depend on contradictory articles
Should I leave
Should I stay
Should I try again
Should we talk about it in the morning
There is no manual for love
I should stop searching
But I continue to

We are small blobs of imperfections and
I don’t care what the world says
I see this beauty, I hear this beauty, and
I will fight for this beauty
That we call love
They will try to bring you down
But I will raise you up
We will eventually realize
That this is enough
I am me and I am hopeful
And I will sing a hymn to all the soulful
Poets out there whose hearts speak in broken lines
All the lost
All the forgotten
All the love in us which has faded in time
Because the world keeps on shrinking
And our hearts keep on sinking
To what the naysayers say
That we gotta take all our metaphors and brokenness away
If we ever want to integrate in this society
And live happily, normally, as they see
And now we have forgotten how to truly live
Forgotten that it takes rising and falling to ever truly give
Our broken selves to the ones who need it the most
Which is in our own arms, how long has it shouted its throes
And now we need to tell the poet in us that we can try again
Write again, fight again, and be ourselves against the world
And someday soon, I know we will be heard
Cause although we are small blobs of imperfections
Perfection has always been a lie
We are who we are
And we can, and we will, write our own broken lines

When teardrops stay in your eyes
Its pretty poetic, don’t you think?
I used to be afraid of letting them fall
But now I let them stay for seconds
So that I know how it feels to feel
The value of split seconds

That split second before -

How many people die every second
How many people are forgotten every second
One day you will be a statistic
One day you will be none
**** it
Life is not meant to be taken so seriously
Just live
Just live
For one second,
Just… live.

I told myself a few years ago
when my heart was left abandoned
on a dusty, cracked road with no one else to go home to

"I wanna start writing poetry again"
as I numbed all the pain and prepared all the stolen luggage
to start life anew and take myself far from the people who knew
the lost soul I was back then
and maybe… forget

Instead,
I remembered

I remember when I started writing poems at 11
I wrote my way through teenage angst and unexplained tears
regret, confusion, hatred at the world that didn't seem to understand me, when the words did

I grew older and by 16, I saw how anger turned into sadness and sadness turned into love
and every poem I wrote took me to places higher than my hands could ever reach
a world of connections, hidden meanings, and clarity

Clarity —

until love turned me blind and I began writing poems to lie
to myself that I loved the person who said he loved me yet touched me in places the words never did
as I hid in my own broken corridors for the last two years
with a poet who lost all the words she had to her fears
because she gave them all away to those who didn’t even know how to read poetry

Years passed and now the poet has awoken
A new light shining in the places she thought she had forgotten
endlessly flowing with words, words, words
serving as a ticket to the unseen tomorrow
she's now willing to take

And maybe until now she's still afraid to write the next line

But she has begun to realize —
she can never escape from poetry

She can only pick up the pen once again.

Blank blank nothing but blank
Sometimes I forget the happy things I used to write to myself
Out of anger
I wish I just got better
But nothing seems to change
I wrote, nothing seems to change
Why the **** does nothing always change?








Why?

I listen to the humming
It echoes inside
That is your music

Maybe we'll make do with the pixels that bind us together
Two-hour talks we share in our own tiny version of forever
Thin but treasured screens that allow me to see your beautiful smile
Airwaves bringing messages, traversing thousands of miles
Just to get to where they need to be

Oh the stories they would tell.

It wasn’t lightning
Nor a forest fire
Not a storm that shook
The depths of a tower
It was a wave that built up
Bit by bit through edges and
Jagged formations
Like all the months that led
Up to this
It was the sweet song of salvation
I tasted on your lips
Made me pick up the pieces yet again
To form a whole
No longer just a hole
A dash of evergreen on a silent winter night -
Holy night
This.

What was so amazing about you

Pondering over quirks I’ve grown
To love
The more I see
The more I understand
The more it unravels —
My answer:

Maybe it was
The way you held your head high
As if the gods couldn’t make you bow

Maybe it was
The way you went barefoot
When everyone stood comfortably on their shoes

Maybe it was
The way you studied the universe like
It owed you all its knowledge

Or maybe it was
The way you took all our impossibilities and
Shrugged them all off in a few seconds
Just by being you

Being you.

So if you asked me what was so amazing about you —
Tell me, what was not?

You and I
Holding onto different
Strings following different
Pathways sharing different
Dreams living different
Worlds

Yet how did we knot our strings together
Intersect and walk the same path together
Find our dreams in each other
Met in between and saw what truly mattered?

Love.

the way your cheeks feel on my palms
that little stubble on your chin
the red spots on your space
because you're allergic to just about everything (but me)

i miss the familiarity of you
i miss the way your voice cracks when you sing blink-182 songs
the way your accent always shows no matter what language you use
i miss the the way you impress everyone because
you sound so different to them but so familiar to me

these men i **** do not compare to you
and i may be the most amazing lover to them
but they do not know what you have done to me
the way i will touch the sun if it means you get to live
a thousand more happy lifetimes

i miss the familiarity of you
the way you have shown me what love means
and if love truly is just a choice
i know in each universe that exists
id have chosen you,
always you.

because know this, dear:

you are my sunset, my sunrise
my stars who stay even through night and day
you are my achilles
my archangel, my lucifer
you are everything i could ever ask for
you are familiarity itself.

And yesterday's doubts
I used to crumble at the thought of falling
Now I am proud
Of the courage I discover
Within the darkest sanctuaries I once laid
Tomorrow is full of hope
A new kind of poetry I unravel everyday.

You are my anchor.
in this sea of confusion
i choose you.

no waves could ever weather
what we have
and what we could be.

for this love is time immemorial
more than the first bubbles that sprouted from earth
and created life itself.

and if poseidon compels me
to worship him,
i will not bow.

i have surrendered these waters
only for You to swim in,
my deity.

is a peculiar thing
  Someone who listens
     and has the patience
        to bear with all your
          pains and frustrations
             in this funny thing called
            

                             “life”


                           In a place so unfamiliar
                   a familiar voice brings you
             back to reality just by saying
         “you mean so much to me”
  enough to make you believe
and try and live and hope

                        
                           again

I look forward to our ordinary days together
Special nights are cool too
But thinking of the groceries
Bills, chores, and old people stuff
We’ll do together someday
Just warms my heart like microwaved
Tuna sandwiches (which I love, by the way)
So listen
While you’re resting and sleeping
Put my dreams for tax calculating
In the fridge for now (we’ll take them out soon)
Just know that this ordinary poet has
An extra-ordinary
Love for you

Like it was meant for you to say
The letters drip from your lips like honeydew
Its syllables walk upon the ramparts of your tongue
Lulling me in your savoury taste
I slumber with ethereal addiction

Is a sum of choices
Both good and bad
Beautiful and sad
But why am I so certain
I've made the most beautiful choice --
Falling in love with you?

Warm it up while we're apart
With your hands, a sanctuary long overdue
As I hold yours, and protect it through and through
Tonight, we sing the most beautiful song
Written for two, for a world more known
Outside, the storm continues and though that may be
But at this moment, at this point of time, you have found me
And I've found you, and I no longer want to hide
Because when I look the other way, I see you by my side
And it's a place I want to be, to come back to, a place to be happy
To live, to grow, to change, to see
Colours once unbeknownst to my eyes
A love that lasts even outside the goodbyes
So hold my heart, hold it close
Small as it is, it hopes, it loves, it trusts, and it knows

i miss you and it confuses (the hell out of) me
because there are things that simply cannot be
so convince me it's all just for ***:

the way you stop when it hurts
even when i tell you to keep going
the way you always ask me if im ok
the way you are when you’re moaning
the way you kiss my forehead
the way you hold and ******* body
the way you touch my hand
and tell me you're clingy
the way you say you think of me even when im not there
the way you like it when i call you "baby"
the way you say "i would ******* everyday if i could"
the way you give everything to me

Baby, i wanted to believe you were a bad idea
but i like you more than i thought i did
so much that i could fall —

then, reality hits
we could never be anything more
than the paradise we've built inside these four walls
the thousand little deaths we've buried under your ragged bedsheets
(to the songs we like to get ****** to)

Baby, the lies we've put up with just to keep this going

so convince me until i finally convince myself:
this is just for ***
and let me lie for just a little more

Blessed be the moment
I will never have again
The smile
I will never see again
The warmth
I will never feel again
The touch
I will never find again
Because I’ve already found them
In you

Entails a lot of risk
When we love, we hand over our fragile hearts
For others to take care of
And I have to admit
That is a frightful thought
The possibility of losing someone
Of hurting someone
And of being hurt ourselves

Yet at the same time
Love entails a lot of hope
When we love, someone’s name begins
To sound familiar through the years
That they begin to become part of our routines
Yet every “I love you” sounds quite new
And no matter how unclear the path may be
And how broken we were and will be
We still manage to love again and move forward
So we can spend a lifetime
Uncovering the enigma
That is this person
Who may be composed of the same matter
As eight billion specimens
But contains a story
Far more known
Far more beautiful than anyone else’s

They can try, but either science nor philosophy nor literature (I admit) can ever truly explain it.

To understand the incomprehensible
To risk when we never expected to
To take a leap of faith and take the chance
To bring ourselves a warmth
We thought we had already lost long ago
Showing us the way to a
Home we thought we never had
Beautiful, I say
I could get used to this.

“Yo. How’d your day go?”
“So - ”

This, is home.

You are home.

No words could ever encapsulate
Our existence
Save for this one:

Flawedness

The flawedness in being
In becoming
The flawedness of our stories
Like the girl too afraid to try
The girl who has tried everything yet yearns for more
The boy who cannot feel
The boy too tired of feeling
The person living despite it all

"How are you?"

I am existing
Living
Trying
Being
Like the rest of us

But I sure as hell think
It would taste like this

It would taste like:
Sabrina Carpenter songs at 6am
Wearing heels
Taking an hour to choose an outfit
Putting on makeup
The urge to text you
The urge to kiss you
The urge to hug you from the back
Waking up to the thought of you
Sleeping to the idea of you

I tell myself
"In two weeks,  
I'll get over this"
Because I always do

But until then,
I'll just be this *******-ridden girl
With withdrawal symptoms