do not date a girl
who writes.
she will internalize
everything,
carve poems
into your eyelashes
instead of
kissing them,

she will analyze you,
calculate age
from the rings
your coffee cup
leaves
instead of refilling it.

she will memorize
the way your
lips curl around steam,
but not that you
take it
two sugars,
no cream.

she will read your
palm instead of
holding it
against her chest.

she will not
blink
when you leave,
because she is
already
romanticizing it.

I spend
hours
listening to
music
that no one
else likes.
I draw on myself:
my arms,my clothes are
covered in pen

When I younger,
I would eat the
junk food
my grandma gave me
when driving me home
from school.
I lied to my parents
about eating the food;
"No,Mom,
no,Dad,
I didn't eat
what Grandma gave
me."
I always lied to my parents
but they found out anyway
and they never believed me
again.

My sweetest addiction
is lies,
sugary fantasies
that never fill you up
The gluttony just makes you hungrier
for the
truth.
Today I am
an honest person,
but I still crave lies.

But
if I crave lies,
why do I also
want the
truth?

A shoebox of letters
hand written on yellow looseleaf
pages upon pages of promises
written in red ink,
a coffin in need of a burial
a reminder of a life
and a love denied.

February 14th, 1989
penned within my first year
the name at the top is not mine
but she writes to him
the way you will write to me
only two decades later.

I shiver as I read each draft;
to realize our failed romance
was but an echo of the past.

Let today teach me the things that yesterday did not.

They say the coldest feeling in the world is jumping into a frozen river in the depths of winter. I've held on to you for to long and I still feel the same but now maybe I should let you go , but that would mean loosing apart of myself that once made me gold.  Why can't you hear my call , why are you walking with you back facing me , makes me feel like I'm never going to see you again. Makes me wonder what I actually meant to you , cause you make it so easy for me to see how u can let go of me. Knowing all this still my heart beats your name , I tell myself I don't love you but my heart reassures me I do. The coldest feeling in the world is loving someone who doesn't love you back. I can ask you for love but what the point love not given freely is sign it doesn't want to  be given. I can say I wasted time on u but we both know that time was never wasted. Guess I'm a sucker for love , a victim of an unpunished crime. But still the beat from my heart spell your name. The bitter coldness you've left me with is incomparable , its indescribable but weirdly its satisfying knowing the pain and confusion is from you.

I've always contested this theory of time.
This counting of sands in hourglass bottles.
They always said time was in our hands.
But I didn't mind because the sun always rose, always set.
I never yearned to stop it. I never yearned to stay.
Until I met you.
Until I found myself in your arms in the morning till dawn
and it never felt long enough.
Until the words that made me melt into puddles formed time tables that showed a past moment I never wanted to escape from.
From the falling of snow, to the falling of leaves.
The hands on clocks were slowly gripping us by the shoulders;
tearing us apart.
Wars with the one thing we couldn't defeat.
Until kisses could hold time for a moment, we could never get enough.
Inserting coins into machines so that maybe hope
could fall out of the slot into our empty palms.
Once the days got shorter as the air grew cold,
we had to dig up for good memories to keep us holding.
Your skin had already been traced by my fingers,
your lips had already been pressed into mine.
there was nothing keeping us together other than not wanting
to wake up alone at the sound of beeping alarms.
To wake up calls tellings us that life doesn't stop for anyone.
The cold coffee that tastes as bitter as remembering the battle with passing minutes.
Some battles are meant to be lost.
We lost this one, we were left with learnt lessons.
I never bargained for lessons in the first place, I wanted to be left with you.
Wars are temporary. We we're supposed to be forever.
But once again, forever is controlled by ticking hands.
And ours were never strong enough to resist it.

Open books with black covers containing stories never good enough to be read, words never long enough to contain the fragment of a thought. Maybe that's why I turn to putting my own in the complexity of poems, maybe that's why I'm never satisfied because I can never say what I mean. Sometimes I don't think you know what I mean, so if you haven't been able to read the between the lines; I miss you. I've been looking for so many ways to say it but none of them have been enough to make you come back. The thing about poetry is its never enough to make you feel the way I do. It'll never make you realize that ink seeps out of my pens with the purpose to make you feel something; but it never does. The thing about poetry is that you need to be empty to write it and that's why I learnt how to after you left. The shut door opened a new one which was the will to write about all the broken pieces of myself. The thing about poetry is it requires to see life through the eyes of things unspoken. Little do most know that mirrors and picture frames can speak novels of things forgotten which is me to you. The thing about poetry, is that I'm running out of things to say. I'm running out of words to spray on city walls, or carve in the wood of dying trees. The thing about poetry is that this isn't it. This is the goodbye, good luck. I have nothing more to bleed out for you, my mind is turning to dust. This is the last "I love you" I have left to write about, this is extended hands with empty palms.
This is the apology. It's me trying to feel something more than what I do, and as hard as I try to get there, I can swear that in nights of deafening silence I can still hear the sky screaming out your name.

Dear Academia;
I took the adderall
because I thought
you wanted me
to be a machine.  I didn't
understand that
amphetamine tasted
like candy once you
got used to the way
your jaw locked and your
ears rang.  Dear
academia, did you
see my face when you
read my GPA, did
you see the way I stayed
up too late after my
after school activities
trained me to live with
anxieties?  Dear academia,
why am I afraid of the mirror?
Why did you teach me how
to write a perfect paper but
never prepared me for
the look in his eye when he told
me he didn't love me either.  Dear
academia, i'm ******* and you're
swallowing me, does the sting
of your impulses feel better
when you know you're eating
my hard earned money?  
Dear academia, why
do you give me empty promises?  Why
should I spill my blood with
this diploma, list
my ethnicity and birthdate
next to the insignificance
of what you think makes me
worthy, do
these details feed your
impending due dates or
are you just getting off
to the idea that
only the educated few
know how to
think straight?  Dear
academia,
I tried my hardest
to let you fool me, I
can feel your ego fattening
beside me as I watch your
children scramble for their
ideas of monetary
gluttony.  You're increasing
our wage gaps, do my late night
tears fuel your addiction to epistemic
poverty?  Dear academia, you
taught me to think critically.   I am on fire
with the matches you forgot
you hatched within
me.  Scorpions occasionally
eat their parents and I hate
to admit that this ****
has me hungry.