what makes us beautiful? printed notes sanctioned by the government? three layers of plastic that attaches to the skin. electricity that runs in your spines, blue rays invading your lonely night. a night where jasmine’s weep because you’ve lost sight of their existence.what makes us beautiful? pixelated rays emitting diodes of dopamine. colours and colours of chrome attached to screens. what makes us beautiful, then? 360 degree surveillance across borders and borders of human civilisations. what makes us beautiful then? maybe a solitary ray of sun as it wraps around your face at dawn? but how would you know that, as you’re doused from the pixels of yesterday, making you numb enough to make sleep through the morning.

we all have our stories.
stored in cafes, empty beer bottles,
soaked clothes, tattered floppy disks.
old film cameras, b/w reels.
we keep these memories with us,
and displace them as well.
their cytotoxicity travels
throught terminals of life's airport.
eventually new souls come and go.
terminals change, destinations flicker
on digital screens.
we delay our feelings, fall in love
with the impossibility of circumstance.
we all have our stories,
maybe in poems like these, or
photographs like the screenshot i would take to share this poem.
we all have our stories,
and not all stories are as happy
as the plants kept beside me while
i sit and write this poem down.

I sit on my chair
Looking at the vase
With dried flowers
Sitting there for days
So do I
We share looks
We share the pain
We share the agony
Of no one caring

my hands tremble on paper,
the sharp pencil crisply glides,
across sheets spread out on the table.
my feelings are laid bare,
dispossessed of the weapons.
history is written in the past.
so why am i worried about the future?
ink laid bare across battlefields of corpses.
these documents have split apart lives,
memories and hopes.
i bury all hopes of being happy in this world.
because what i want must not be confused with what i must feel.
so i hide behind these words,
writing thousands of pages, scrolling past ages and ages of sacrifice.
to only end up
saying nothing at all.
d
  o
     n
         o
            t
          h
       i
    d
e

i am terrible at explaining this feeling. the feeling of not being enough. The feeling of sacrificing life's gold to obtain silver. they say human relationships are pure but what's pure in exchanges which only speak of dreams and desires? what's so pure in exchanges of commodities between souls when the essence of love evaporates in the potency of moonsoon. i think i have done enough for everyone. the emptiness in me is nothing but an anthem of loss of meaning in the miniscule negotiations of life's key moments. and the only way to escape losing my essence is to stop injuring myself and healing the same scars. all over again.

"I'm right." says he
Says her, you, my friend and me
"right" stares from afar.