You are just my fragile dream
My butterfly dream
My dandelion love
The elusive hummingbird among
Twigs and leaves
The illusive flower within the
Murano glass
That can only be reached when
Shattering

Not to be chased
Not to be touched
Not to be caught
Without escaping
Without breaking
Without losing

Still I tried to chase it
Tried to caress it
Tried to catch it
Tried to love it
All the while losing it
Losing myself
Running towards
This mirage of a love
As I get blown away
By the wind of impossible things
And storms of self-deceiving affections
Till I am merely a handful of stardust
Breaking
Escaping
Eventually blending in
Seamlessly
Within
The Desert of Lost Dreams

I showed you the way to my soul,
Hoping you would walk right in,
And indulge in all the little hidden
Presents I have planted for you
In my long unoccupied garden of love,
That yearned to be seen.  
But you found no urgency to enter
No need and no desire to knock.
Is it because you thought
I would always be right here
At the gates, keeping it wide open
Waiting to give you everything,
As soon as you asked?

But you never did.

So losing faith, and losing heart
I finally decided to shut it down
completely.
Hoping you would finally be intrigued
By the sudden closed doors
And finally be lead by your regretful curiosity
To knock, and inquire
What was hidden deep within.
What treasures could have been yours to
Take.
And keep.


(But most likely,
You would still hide away quietly
In your cozy little cabin of safety,
At most,
Only occasionally peering distantly from within,
Never taking the risk to leave.
Never taking the risk of a prickle or a sting
From plucking and holding even the most beautiful things
From my youthful affections in its zealous Spring. )

I watched as he slicked back her silk-like hair into a french braid, almost like he was weaving himself through the strands, connecting himself to her. I watched with innocent eyes, young eyes, tired eyes, confused eyes, I was only five. At five years old I was able to recognize where I stood on the scale of human worth and I was able to acknowledge the fact that for some unknown reason I, along with me and my two other sisters, were placed below her. She was so high up above me that I couldn’t even look at her. She was pretty. I, however, was not, and I accepted that about myself for years upon years as I lathered cosmetics onto my bruised flesh, hoping the more I applied, the greater the chance was that you might look at me with the same amount of life in your eyes as when you're looking at her. I was set on a seventeen year long self-destructive journey to try to win your love. I was taught that love had to be won, that no matter how much it stung you had to keep that clean and pristine smile on your less than average face, because you weren't to let them know you were hurting.
I wondered if there were others like myself, enduring a relentless identity crisis, trying personalities on like wardrobes. I wondered if it were possible for the pain to be diminished, if it were possible to learn how to breathe again, so I began writing. I wrote my feelings down on paper and somehow they ended up on a poetry website, encountering view after view, like upon like, accumulating feedback from others who shared the same pain I felt.
"You're beautiful," they wrote.
At the time, I didn't understand what they meant by this. No photos of me were posted, how can you measure beauty through words?  I learned that being beautiful meant having minimal flaws, dropping jaws, turning heads. Being beautiful meant being loved, being beautiful meant mattering. I didn't understand, so I started singing.
I sang and let my words exert themselves through melodies, through D-minors and half-broken music notes, I sang, I sang, I sang, and oh God, I couldn't stop.
"You're beautiful," they shouted to me while I was on stage, performing with a fleeting heart that was ready to burst out of my chest and run away, but this time, something was different, I understood.
I knew that she meant I am beautiful in the way that I am, the way that I spill my emotions through my songs like an everlasting ocean, and I knew that she meant I am beautiful in the way that my mind is in a constant state of perplexity.
I looked at her and I saw her face, her pretty face, her face that I longed to have. She had a perfect nose, perfect eyes, perfect lips, perfect complexion, perfect hips. I believed all these things were the key to love, and eternal happiness, I believed they were the ingredients to making me beautiful, but now,
I'd rather have a bent nose, boney hips, bad skin and bad lips, and have someone tell me I'm beautiful, because I knew it meant I was beautiful in the way I loved, laughed, wrote, sang,
Than to have no physical flaws and ignorantly believe that being beautiful in the way that I look, is enough.
So I will keep being beautiful, and not to feed the myth that some day you will love me for me, but because I have finally found what I was made to do, and who I was made to do it for.
I am a girl, inside a song, inside a poem, and I am my own.

What you are feeling is not love
Love is not this envy coursing through your veins turning your skin green.
No,
Love is the skeletons that climbed out your closet, content with being seen
It’s A Still of the best moments  
Still alive when she’s dead
Still, in a hurricane of emotions, that reside in your head

Love is not her hair, her *******, soft lips or strawberry scent
Not the contour of her body;
It's porcelain touch
Nor the way her voice fades at the end of a sentence
Instead, it’s in the absence
In the things you can’t sense, but still feel
In The parts of her that are least physical but most real

Love is not the way fears became a blindfold
That hid you from the Truth
Torn from a blanket of jealousy
Covering you up,
Keeping you bitter

Rather,
Love is the tear-stains on your jacket shoulder
The warm embrace
The eye of the storm.
She kept that jacket
And Maybe
Just Maybe
She’s wrapped herself in it
And realized that:
Love is the only reason you didn’t want to leave her
And the exact reason
Why you did

You might have seen them through the window,
a little girl pouting on the stool and her mother
behind her, deft fingers weaving the strands
together, chocolate hair in french braids and the
wrinkles in her blue gingham dress.

There is a beginning to everything.

Golden-hair boy, caramel colors glinting in the sun,
pieces that flopped over his eyes and plastered
themselves over his forehead when the wind blew
erratic. He wears t-shirts streaked with dirt and high-
water jeans half-rolled, half-bunched up to his knees.

She thought, I could love this boy.

They're in the field again, ankles itching under her
frilly socks and ants crawling over her shoes. He lets
one amble around on his finger while she studies him.
Holding it up to the light, all serious and squinting,
He whispers, "They are so small."

She remembers this field for a long time.

She points to his heart. This is where I live. He looks
at her skeptically, raises an eyebrow."Is it awfully
uncomfortable there?" She lets the silence grow while
the birds make conversation and smiles to herself when
she sees him listening too.

Sometimes it is cold, but then you remember me.

There are pieces of love scattered around this world.
I have been trying to find them, trying to arrange them
into a comprehensible hope. There's the field. There's the
beach. There's the little stream that carries us where we
need to go. There's you, in that one summer.

It's been so long, but I remember. I remember it perfectly.

She's making a daisy chain while he looks out over the
lake. Climb the tree for me. I want to see how high you
can go. Nearly breaking the branches with his weight, he
calls out, in the purest joy you've ever heard to this day.
"You should see this view!"

*I do.

There are so many defective computers,
Their cable cords tangled and fraying.
We don't know if we should fix their screens
Or turn off all electronics thirty minutes before bed.
We fear that their corrupted microchips
Will pass on their viruses
And steal our identities.
So we upgrade and receive a shiny new machine,
Content to let the fractured ones
Corrode in a dusty repair room,
Their helpless tones growing fainter

"Future"
The word alone is dangerous
So full of blown-out-candles,
Long-drowned purse-change,
And hundreds of thousands of shooting stars gone still.

I have so many hopes pricking into my skin
that I start to think I'm stitched of impossibilities

As if my soul was drenched in daydreams.

I laugh at the paradox that is "Future":
Today is yesterday's tomorrow,
And this poem, the past.

Every time you ask me who I want to be
In ten-times-three-six-five I sink
Deeper in my body
My skin tinged blue
Dye creeping from my chest to my toes
Dye for blood, blue for heartbeats.

Pardon me, Future? Who am I?
No answer.
Sorry, this poem is too
DIFFICULT
too STRENUOUS
to think about right now.

I know what's next: tergiversation.
Ask me who I was before

My poetry will be a compendium of a girl
I never knew.