i.
moments are ephemeral
so i hold on tightly
to the closeness of you.
our arms linked together,
you keep bumping into me
and i keep colliding into
you.
it's as if we are stars,
and we make our own
little boom
in this sky.

we're almost a firework, honey.
we're almost-

ii.
hey.
long haired sweetheart,
golden boy of no where,
your halo is skewed,
but i bet you'd taste like lights.
you're the brightest
type of shine.
sure, you glow in the dark,
but you're glowing in the light too.
and they say,
you're brighter with me,
they say you are
just as smitten
as i am.

maybe we can make this work, honey.
maybe we can-

iii.
what if i was to paint you in indigo,
sew patches of
a blank night sky
onto your dimples,
and hang stars from your
butterfly lashes?
would you
let me sit on your lap like
it's a throne,
make me your
queen,
so that i can say i've made
the human form of night time
my lover.
king of hearts, conqueror of the day.

we hold on, because it heals our tired hurt, honey.
we hold on-

There are no right answers.
The sky rejects the birds, turns them
over to gravity,
embedding them in the concrete and dirt.
The grit refuses to become a pearl,
just as the wound refuses to heal
and the flesh eats itself.
The market sees a sudden spike in
sales of Champagne and cyanide.
Coordinated efforts seek and fail
to curtail the rising tide of violence
in the nation's dreaming.
You realise that this crude, barbaric language
that you can't understand
is your own.
Beauty glitches and pixelates.
Frightened, furtive confessions of love
are unheard over proud, visceral
proclamations of hate.
Tongues divorce mouths.
Every now and then, a voice
inside your head says,
'Thud.'
The measures of sanity become
more quantifiable and
totally arbitrary.
The horizon
tightens
like
a noose.

It doesn't matter if this is wrong.
There are no right answers.

We never spoke of love.

We spoke of cosmic miseries;
we spoke of falling statues;
we spoke of unsolved mysteries,
of the prevailing cultural attitudes.

We spoke of miscommunication
and Comedy and Tragedy as brothers;
we spoke of being lost and broken,
yet healed at the hearths of others.

We spoke of Winter's silent war
and how the Sun scared us both;
we spoke of wanderlust and bars
and how our lives were the funniest jokes.

We spoke of possibility,
in coded symbols and allegories,
of all the universes we wish we could be,
of all the things we'd do with wings.

We never spoke of love,
and yet,
somehow,
it's all we ever
talked about.

My body is not beautiful -
it shows every row of dirt plowed,
every callous axe handle held
irreverently between the hands
that are swollen and cold;
my fingers, the puffy soldiers who smoked
one too many cigars in the
valleys of their webbed hills.

My body is not beautiful -
it is pitted with dirt entrenched in my pores
and craters of microorganisms
embedded in my flesh,
sending red fires into neutral skin,
a war beneath the surface
with smoothness being a casualty.

My body is not beautiful -
it has hair growing in places I hate,
thick layers of clinging calories
and expanded fat cells that
refuse to expire no matter how many
suicides I run or deaths I die
daily in an attempt to flatten them.

My body is not beautiful -
it is strong as hell.

My shoulders, firm and balanced,
tauntingly mock Atlas for complaining
of holding the world on his -
what he calls a tragedy, they call Monday.
My back has always carried whatever
burden I laid on it,
and though it's strained and torn
has yet to break beneath the weight
of the sorrow and the memories
living has given to me.

My legs, short and wide,
have lunged with mountains
by their sides,
moving forward through infernos
I can only describe as
"liquid fire as heavy as lead,"
traversing continents
and rushing rivers
knowing they were not going to give.

My arms are atlases,
traversed for countless miles
by vein-y highways
that lead to the ghost towns
I've gotten tattooed on my skin
to remind me that my
vagabond blood is pure
and my bones are made
of wanderlust.

No, my body is not beautiful,
but it is strong;
it has been places,
seen and done things.
It allows the universe
to make its home in my spinal
chord,
midnight to seep into my pores
and sing my heart to sleep
with starry melodies,
to leave behind the cement parking lot
I was born and raised in
and chase the horizon
no matter where it leads.

My body is not beautiful,
but it still deserves respect
for all it's done,
and all it holds,
regardless of my cellulite
or fat rolls.