For you I was a chapter
A part of your life so brief,
You had no idea you stole
My heart so quickly like a thief

For me you were the book
I kept turning page by page
Never even imagining
By the end you’d disengage

Each sentence I read was delicate
Like a sweet melody of words
You and I were free to fly
As free as two blue birds

I thought the book would
Never end, and go on forever
But you shut the book tightly
And now my heart is severed.

You left me all alone
With just the pages to mend
Together my broken heart
Why oh why did it have to end?

i.
you love ghost
like a train you just missed.

with a heart full of regret
and a small bit of hope.

as if you were to change one small thing,
they might return.

ii.
you have been gone for 6 years now,

and i am no longer sure
if you are everywhere,

or if i look for you in everything.

I pass the places we were
one year ago today
not purposely,
it's just that my Gods seem
to have an ill sense of humor.

Walking slowly, numbly, dreamlessly around
a blinking city
that refuses to belong to me
ever again.

With every step kicking up clouds of dirt
in form of awkward memories
from not too long ago
that feel like a hazy far away dream.
it is easier to pretend they were merely that.
Reality is much harder to accept.

Bright Cakes with soft candle light
that graced your brow.
And I find myself hoping and wishing
I didn't know that you were doing so well,

if so...I'd be able to lie to myself
and imagine that you think of me
a little sometimes.

I hope you found what you wanted,
what you relentlessly worked so hard for.

Happy Birthday.

The distance between us
is so wide that it can't
be scaled in inches, feet, days, or years;
it can only be measured in life times.

The version I knew of you,  
if I knew you at all,  
is only a shadow in my memory
left over from a previous life.

There are few things I can remember clearly
that have not been softened by time,
or cumbered by loneliness.

Those are:
One,
the small shape of your eyes
when sunlight broke, violent,
like a stone through windows
as particles danced
above us in slow motion.

Two,
the roughness of your rug
against our bodies
as we awoke
on your living room floor.

Three,
the way you offered me your long arms,
like ribbons, I wrapped them around myself,

and finally I felt like a gift.

All words
have been replayed
and rewritten so many times.
Like a photocopy of a photocopy
they have begun to wane.

Everything I have ever written
reads like a piece to the bridge
I am building to get back to you,
to remember who I was
when I was unscathed.

Everything I have ever written
is an ode to a past life,
an ode to reincarnation.
You have made a spiritual being
out of someone as cynical as me.

You would laugh, if you read the last sentence.

But there is no other way to explain
how I can feel such an anchor
for a practical stranger,
whose only familiar feature
that years have not taken
is a first and last name.

I want to tell you how I am an empty house
with four dark corners that collect
fears like dust.

I want to tell you how I am an empty house,
So many things have been planted
but not one has sprout.

I want to trace the lines in
cracks of broken windows
and tell you how I formed webs of jagged glass

I want to tell you how I am an empty house;
a living and breathing
sign that somebody lives here,

yet nobody lives here.


I want to tell you how I am an empty house.

i followed you into the sunset
it darkened us both after burning us numb
we called it
love