Your ghostly presence dwells in every corner
Of this house
Sauntering pass
Screeching my name
As pearl like eyes stare through me
Whispering eerie confessions
From starved lips
Claiming, I, am yours
Yet your hollow words wither and fall
Scattered amongst the ashes
Of all we used to be.

The blank page…

A writers greatest friend
Or greatest enemy.
When we're all faced with the possibility
That our last piece
Will be our, last, piece.

My poetry,
is selfish
The dead
never stay dead
Twisting in their grave
No peace for rest
As I sprawl them ungracefully
Across my page
Dragging them from depths unknown
To live once more
Amongst my words.

I remember the day you left me as vividly as yesterday
and how I tried to memorize every detail of your face
when we said goodbye, as if I would never see it again,
because I wasn’t sure if I would be able to live
not being able to remember the person I called my home

I used to think of you as my oxygen,
as tightly-sewn thread,  holding me together,
as a half-finished love story,
you were always something that I swore
I couldn’t live without,
you were always the reason I woke up
every morning feeling brand new,
and I wasn’t even sure life would be worth living
without you

but the clock kept on ticking without you by my side,
and I’m learning to let go, you beautiful creature,
I am still learning,
but one day I will understand
and although my heart still stings when I read your letters,
and even though I feel a pang of emptiness
when the air gets cold and I remember
everything about you,

I am learning how to forget you,
we will always be words left unsaid
but maybe things are better this way
(I will live without you)

she was a novel
with twists and turns
the kind shoved behind
library bookshelves
and under heartsick beds

she spun words
into velvet
and they seeped
right through her lips
and onto his lonely skin

and oh, how she loved him
with the passion of a sunset
and the bravery of a child
and her words craved him
even more than she did

he was the reason why
her eyes strained a torturous fog
and her words clogged her throat
and a dozen unsent letters
desperately cluttered her room
and her words weren't velvet,
they were just word
and just like her,
they were not worth loving anymore

if you can hold her hand
without feeling torn at the idea that
one day, you may never feel its warmth again,
then you are not in love with her

do not keep muttering worn-out
i-love-you's
under your breath
just to fill the empty spaces in the air
even if they no longer beat with passion,
do not try to explain the thousands of reasons
why you love her
if you don't

because if you can live with the thought
of her name being engraved in
someone else's mind,
her fingers running through someone else's hair,
the thought of those beautiful words
whispered into lips that don't belong to you
then you have never loved her, even for a second

and the bitter fragments
of the love she gave away
were never worthy to
belong to you

She held more secrets than seconds in a day,
mumbling pained confessions in hushed whispers
that bled out like stab wounds trailing paths
on white snow,
painting a china doll façade made of scarlet
as an eloquent attempt to mask the fragility
she aspired to hold

And that is just what she did,

She held,

onto hopes dangling from the edge of skyscrapers,
breath permanently stolen from her lungs
despite shaking hands itching to let go

storing memories made of dust within damaged pockets
even when the weight got so gruesome
she could no longer bear to walk
with a soul made entirely of gray matter,
training heartstrings to stretch
and cradle every delicate moment
she feared losing
before they could even take place


She is the girl who will collect your voicemails,
hoarding letters like seashells
resting along abandoned shorelines
due to the danger of losing the soft breaths
of the only one who was capable
of breaking all of her rules,
who whispered her name like
unfinished stanzas of a poem
she did not know how to write

Fear,
and fear alone-
of the potential that the ocean could swallow
the glass shards and kiss the remnants of her joy
goodnight
before she could even feel them
splashing against the same skin
she never felt at home in

I look at you and I see half-finished poems and words that don’t exist, your eyes are like indigo oceans I keep drowning in but somehow I don’t mind not being able to breathe.  I wish I knew more about why you are the way you are, what terrifies you the most about yourself, and why I find it difficult to catch my breath when you look at me as if I am a stolen daydream. You make up for a lot of things, really, like going through fourth period half asleep because last night it took me three hours to stop thinking about you. You make up for that, and everything else. You are made of electricity and good intentions stitched together with a voice that could shatter a million hearts, and I am just a lost soul wondering why I trust you with mine. And I do, I do, I trust you with my stupid old heart, and I want to memorize every single corner of yours like the back of my hand. I want to know how a heart like yours could love such a wounded one like mine, but maybe that’s what love is, sacrificing perfection for something tragically real. I look at you and I see fluctuating potential, like the morning sun peeking out behind tired gray clouds, and how sometimes that has to be enough. Ever since I met you, my heart has remembered how to beat, my hands have remembered how to hold, and you love me enough to make me forget how much I don’t love myself. Maybe you are temporary and maybe you’re an illusion, but I still cling to the hope that maybe, this is why I held on until now.

I often think about how and why our lives intersected
and how strange it was that we used to be nothing more
than two bright-eyed five-year-old kids
in the same kindergarten class over a decade ago
and how now we were lying down side-by-side listening to Hozier
through his beat-up headphones and stargazing in the back of someone’s pickup truck

and it’s strange how
neither of us had the courage to point out
the fact that there were no visible stars in the cloudy sky that night
because
that
didn’t
matter


all that mattered was the fact that for an eternity and a half,
I had felt more like a glass left half-empty and yet now I wished
that this moment would never end,
that we could just lie here in the freezing cold that burned my bones to the core
just because my head rested fine on his chest and that was enough

and I wonder why it’s so hard for me to open up to him
even though he unfolds himself for me,
opens up doors to his beautiful soul just so I am able to peek through
the cabinets where he stores all of his reasons to live, and
where he hides the parts of him that he would get rid of, if he had a choice

I want to tell him about the poetry I have found in the way he walks,
he talks,
he breathes, and
how staring into those ocean eyes makes me feel
like I’ve suddenly hit the bottom, permanently gasping for air,
but
I love it,
I love it,
I love it,

and as we stare up at the sky
in the back of an old pickup truck
by an old crumbling church,

my God, his voice matches the silent hum of the street lights,
burning in sync with our imaginary stars
and at this moment, I am no longer an almost-empty glass,
I am alive