As guilty as I am, I guiltlessly tell you that I miss you
You're never home, but hey, neither am I
Your freedom is important to you, and I want to understand that, but I can't say that I already do  

Now I have this aching, this urge, this itch, this feeling, that screams at me I have to appreciate you
And now when I try to do just that, you run away from the house which we used to live in

I hurt you whenever I pursued Romance
And that was wrought with a lack of understanding from both of us

And now here we are, standing so far away from each other, yet only a couple miles removed,
and I don't know who
or where
or what
you are anymore



You remember when we would love poetry together?
Do you remember the feelings we had and the solidarity
I remember feeling like you losing your faith was the worst thing that could happen to both of us,  


and then it happened to me

I remember fostering our relationship by going to a church which only you go to now
I miss when we talked about doing drugs in the abstract, never actually doing them
I miss when I could tell you about Romance, and you would listen

I miss sharing my whole self with you
I miss sharing any of myself with you

Thin, white, and a golden rose watch
Diagonally across, I sit and watch
The perhaps brilliant musings of a blonde determined to be studious
And ask only the best questions, of what do I do with this
Beautiful pony tail wrapped piece of gold
Who is no more an object than she is decrepit old
And if at one time she'd look and see this poem I write in her presence
Would she deny it like daggers or receive it like presents?

I do not know, and isn't that the whole point?
To not know, to keep the mystery in joint,
The one I have as close to me as my knuckles
And an Erosical conjecture that buckles
And heaves as if to tell me that it's not right
To sit and watch the watch to my right

Yet this conjecture is as valid as it is fruitless
Just an inflection as invalid as she is cuteless
But the cuteness still doesn't inspire me
To inhale holiness and ask the dreaded why are we
Sitting so terribly far apart, my Heart,
When we could be together a beautiful piece of art?

I step out my front door
and I meet the flood
He is everywhere and waiting
debating and contemplating
new ways to pressure me

I swim out to my car
and I've made it
the destination, far
and the flood is ready to pounce
"How can we squeeze out his every ounce?"

Relentless, he pushes down on me
Unceasing, he presses my heart
In the closed system
the blood in the ****** feedback loop
pulses and pushes boundaries
trying to escape my restricting veins

The flood breathes out
He centers his weight
on my ventricles, my veins
and I am stunned
unable to move
unable to think

A perfect juxtaposition
of stillness and movement

I try to move but the flood falls harder
I try to breathe but the water fills my lungs

I am beneath everything

The flood's name is expectation
it preys to break my faith and
It wins every time
And every time it wins
I breathe shorter
I breathe faster

My body aches
embodied lackluster

He said, "if the girlies don't work out"
To come back here

And get **** faced

And maybe watch some bad movies
Like Predator 2

Past security, ticket given without a second glance
It could've been any old white piece of paper

But he didn't check.
Why wouldn't he check?

Inside are the real predators
The real commodifiers

Who stalk prey called women
Look at the way they look at you

Do you notice the way they look at you?
Or is it like breathing air, or a fish in water

And do you buy into the predator's worldview?
What do you really see when you look at the self?

Only what others see, perhaps?
I understand that

In the car, on the ride here
He said, "I'm looking for something special"

"I don't **** and get out"
But definitely don't stop calling them *******

The culture says who they are,
Rather, the culture says what they are

You are complicit in the culture
Just like me

A stoic face toward oppressors
Is still complacent

A face that prides itself on not objectifying women
Yet lays silent in their objectification,

Isn't he just the problem?
Aren't I that problem?

And the songs that are as unspecial as the ***
You purport to not want

Boom louder than your heartbeat
That you can't tell if it's the bass or the blood

Pulsing through your veins

How do you know what you want isn't real?
Are you oblivious to the remake, the unoriginality?

Like the songs stolen without rights,
You adopt your predecessors' predatory propensities

It's all *******.
That's what our glasses are full with.

The Irish drink to connect
We drink to waste away

The same way we do when we sit
And become one with our couch

At the heart of the Ire-land
Is a history of conflict

And inability to have conflict,
Also known as: war

So they sit and they drink
And they talk and they fight

And they all have bad livers
But their hearts aren't clogged.

But back in the club, there's a one size fits all video
Playing over the one size fits all songs

Catered to the one size fits all people
And our one size fits all pallets

In the blur of the headbanging and the deafening
We lose our precious individuality

But maybe I'm acting too pious to judge as I do
But, if you were in my shoes, wouldn't you?

This weather is here for no longer than a second
So if you're not enjoying every last moment of it
Your heart is of stone

The coldness is nothing to you because it is everything you've ever known
The best place to hide something is every occupiable space in the universe
That's why we can't see God
It's because we see God everywhere and mistake it for something else
That's the theory at least...

If God were finite we'd see Him
We'd see him exist in some places but not others because finititude is not infinite

If this good weather lasted longer than a conglomerate of moments it would mean less
If normality was good weather, good weather would just be normal
The spice of life is variety
We are made aware of presence when
We are made aware that the presence isn't there
I am constantly acclimated to blandness, no matter the substance I taste, if I eat everything all the time
Food will become a simple thing like air
Simply complex
But it'd be around me all the time
Slowly becoming undetectable
If God hugged everyone at every moment the embrace would be intangible even though it may be the only really real thing in this universe
If God gave all He ever had to us at every monent, we'd lose what it means to feel the feelings his gifts give us
And I would feel like I do now
Tired and cold
In this good weather for a change
My heart trembles like my fingers
Cold and nimble
Breathing God in
And breathing God out
Completely unaware of His presence in life's functions
In its bores
In its troughs
In its peaks and in its joys
He is in all

We are always the hero
Of our own story
Blind to the pain we inflict
Unable to see beyond the scope
Of our two limited eyes

So tightly knit
So closely wound
Til falls a slit
Straight to the ground

I won't be 'round for a while
So temporarily lend me your smile

So cognizant, so aware
So indifferent, so beware

Of what I can do when I'm alone
With you and my spirituality
Of my abuse to you shown
And the distortion of reality

He,
The one in front of me,
Speaks in fluent Christianese
And I listen
And fall back into that dialect of antiquity

I,
The atheist in front of him,
Speak in tune
And he nods
And accepts the façade I’ve presented

We,
The former and the current,
Barely communicate
Through a thick layer
Of exclusivity

Eating is such a chore
But health dictates that I eat

There is certainly nothing sacred about it
Just mass being converted to energy, right?

That's how it feels too often
It's easy to forget the evolutionary feat

That is you

And what about breathing?
Isn't it routine enough to just forget?

But the unconscious action can be interrupted
With just one phrase:

"You are now manually breathing"

Did you notice that? Once you start,
It's hard to remember how to stop

Yet breath is so essential
Essential enough to forget

As is to eat. And what a chore health is.
But the Good Life dictates it

So I breathe...
So I eat...

Consider the possibility
That your 4.0 GPA
Is the result of your failing mental health
And inability to accept yourself

Consider, for once,
That you are valuable innately
Regardless of approval

I see your deepest fears
And they're not you
And they don't define you

You are not the terrible feeling
Or the words you tell yourself
When you read that ****** grade

You're also not those butterflies
When they look you in the eyes
And tell you you're valuable

You just are

By yourself


Stop selling
Yourself
To the words
Others say

And when you feel that way
That's not where you have to stay

Listen to that 7th track on that old album
Even if its theology is ****** and shameful
You know what it meant to you when you were young

And when you feel that way
Stand in front of a mirror and say

"I am worth more
than others' estimation of me"

Because that is the real root of the root
That is the true bud of the bud

That you are valuable regardless
Of whether you have a witness

And even if you were the tree falling
Free falling in a wood
Your lumber still makes homes
You leaves still make paper
Your heart still has value
Because

You
Are
Valuable

I miss the summer smells
Before the salacious stopping

Shampoo rising in my car
On the way to church, smalls

Stop smiling
It won’t go on for long

Smile seeping
You’re not wrong

There’s something there
Isn’t there?

But summer, like us
stopped

In other universes perhaps we end up together
And we end up weathering storms in tandem

For now I'm tasked with the duty of being your friend
As you turn yourself into a means to an end

And sometimes you get there because of me
And this is an expression of things unseen
Things too terrible to be seen
Things I'd hold tightly, and closely
Because I can't hold you closely

You are a dream that floats out just in front of the horizon but which falls off the edge of the world if I draw too near

You are the heartbeat skipping in a parked car, and the wings clipping of best friendships formed here

Though you are closer to me than any others
You are the most distant of all my lovers

Though you are the nearest in knowing my soul,
You are the furthest possibility as a whole

When I drop you off so you can cut yourself in half and be used,
Don't fall into the trap that states I don't care about you

I am a slave to my desire to help you be who you want to be
Even if that means destruction especially to you and at times me

Don't fall victim to the hoax of victimizing yourself
Recognize your worth by choosing the contrary, your health

Don't think for a second that I don't love you
Because of all the truths spoken in this poem
This is the truest: that I adore you
That you know me and don't judge me
And I crown you for the way you treat me

Because you, like no other, know me
You, unlike my other lovers, know me
But you, unlike all the others, can't be
A part of me while you're not apart from me

Don't believe in the lie that all you're good for
Is these few moments of euphoria

You're more than an object
Yet you're still the object of my desire

Hi
I’m anthony brandy
And I’m a quarter filipino
Or at least, that’s what my dad tells me
And I’m inclined to believe him because
When I look at the curvature
Of the bones around our eyes
I think I can see it

That somewhere deep down I’m not just a white guy
With a white name
And a whole lot of privilege that comes along with that
But you can’t see it,
And I think that’s what matters

We judge people by who we see they are
And then they become who we say they are

You can’t see it, but I speak Spanish, too
But not because it’s my heritage
Because my white heritage doesn’t have anything to be proud of

I learned Spanish to communicate with others

It all started out as a way to check if people were talking behind my back
And I never even realized that that was a form of guilt-presumption
But as I learned to conjugate and put my words in the right order,
I found out that there are people on the other side of that language barrier
And they have warmer hearts than you could ever imagine
And their arms give the best hugs
And their eyes tell the toughest stories to hear

Like when they came over here, and people heard their accents
They were teased and told to go back to where they came from
And everytime an ******* said that to them,
That home they were told to go back to was always Mexico
Even though Mexico’s not the only country south of Texas

You see, we judge by what we see
And if we’ve never seen or noticed anyone from other countries
We overgeneralize

You can’t see it, but I’m also encumbered by years of religious restrictions
That tell me that my ****** feelings are not allowed
That my doubts have no place near my faith
That my eyes must always bounce
That my vocal cords were meant only for ****** Hillsong songs
And my hands were made to pluck easy four-chord songs
And three-chord songs if you’re lucky

You can’t see it, but there is resentment under this shirt, welling in my chest
And it seeps out of my skin even when I don’t want it to
And I sometimes think it’s best left unexpressed,
But I know, even deeper down than that resentment, that that’s not true

You can’t see it, but I so often feel unnoticed by my peers and my family
Because those doubts that I mentioned before are dangerous,
And my family has wasted no opportunity to tell me that it’s not okay to be who I am,
Having introduced dynamism to my faith
So I am left with only one option:
To hide those things, and keep my mouth shut

What you don’t know, family member, is that when you put on that bumper sticker that said God doesn’t believe in atheists,
You told me you don’t care for me
And what you don’t know, family member, is that when you voted for Trump,
You told my immigrant friends that they should stay away, and that it’s better for them to dwell in their oppression than to even remotely acknowledge it
And what you don’t know, family member, when you tell me how sad it would be for me not to be a Christian,
You tell me it’s not okay to be who I am

But nevertheless, I am who I am
And I will be what I will be
And who I am is a quarter Filipino, privileged white guy who’s trying to do his part
And I wish you could come along with me for that journey
But you are so deeply invested in remaining static,
That I am unsure I can ever help you at all

Telling you stories about my relationships with immigrants can only get me so far into showing you that these people
Are in fact people
And my college education can only get me so far into a conversation with you before you notice that I’m one of those people you call a “libtard”
And you disregard everything I say

I still have my foot in the door, but how long can I keep it open?
When will I blow my cover and be authentic?
Should I have ever kept things a secret in the first place?
Am I just trying to avert inevitable growing pains?

I could not tell you, and I cannot either
But I am nonetheless growing,
Dynamic,
Laden with doubts,
And struggling to make something good come out of my life
I hope you can see that
I hope you can understand
Why I do what I do