so you sew your melancholy shut –
pour your father’s ***
on the stitches
like you always do

i turn my back and bend over –
ache descending my backbone
where your kisses used to rest;
it recoils in instinct

as i keep on digging for the same mistakes
on skinfolds and chromatic bruises
and thin walls where i hung
my tendency to ache
scrubbed out of me like dead skin,
as i lie, washed, stripped, and tender
in these soft, celestine sheets;
i pepper bits and pieces of myself
to diffuse the hurting

but my pain is blinded;
yours, all-seeing
as i draw my three of swords
from my deepest deck of cards
but there’s already an epigraph
of your name on my clavicles
and you see how your all-elysian, moon-drenched lover
is all tainted, all this time,
and darling, how alive you felt
when you fell in love with this disaster
but the truth is staying in love
will always be your death.

and what i know to be deathless love
is now lost in our ghastly lights
and how we danced with liquid fire
long enough to feel it burn
but all roads lead to rome, darling –
all roads lead to ruin
and all the letters i wrote you are banners
burning in its cathedrals
as roman gods watched us
pick our limbs apart.

and do you think
we can love each other through this,
touch our way out,
love our way out of these

wars we waged —
burning houses,
mess we made
kisses dead in our stately wake
this love — this feeling
spilling like ether, leaving
squandered poems
all over the place.
had you known it all along
had you walked away?

but darling how alive you felt —
how alive we felt in love
but  one day you’ll call it crucifixion
and i’ll call it back  my death.

and we fall like sacred dust,
a bedlam of debris.
and i draw my three of swords:
dead-cold steel
and paper-soft sorrows.


do you think we have it in us to love each other out of this?

i let go of myself mid-air,
suspended like a plastered sun goddess —
i long to be smaller. younger. incorporeal
but grief is royal mantle dragged in the mud,
draped on my shoulders, down to my limbs:
like a pair of sunbeams gone astray
and the sun has long left without
so much as a sorry letter.

still, i feel its hands
creeping to the parts of my lungs left untouched.
its glare spreads like rust,
telltale in the daylight glow.

soon, i will implode from all this alien warmth
like a colony of bats, a revolution for the dusk.
soon, the sky will recognize this ancient sadness
throbbing inside a mortal body
like a rejected ***** wanting to escape.

i let go of myself mid-air:
vivid and ugly under the softest parts of sunlight –
all dying in the dusk in slowest motion;
it washes over me. anoints. screams out in mourning
screams out ‘no’.

but i have taken my flights and fall.


i let go of myself mid-air.

skipping back and forth
the stages of grieving
but my body is bottomless —
endless where it hurts the worst.
it continues to grow
like a skin abnormality
over which i trip, head first i tumble down
these words in repetition
their despair, in repetition
in ever so artless ways.

too many indefinite things
gone too visceral
gone too deep these skin layers —
there is an (over)production of them,
to make room for
more. more. more. grief
popping here and there:
an obstacle course.
a grafted stem. a blunder.
what deformities might i uncover
as i dredge myself clean,
as i mow over me?

but my body is bottomless,
in perpetual, grave disquiet —
endless where it feels the worst.

oh how you turn the love as chaotic as ours into something so comforting; i no longer want to call it violent. storm-like. visceral. i want nothing but warm hands and ether kisses, withering like the fire-lit buttercups on your night stand. i want nothing more than to talk to you with a mouthful of sunsets. i want nothing more than the calm quiet nights, with no space between us, our skin aglow under lilac fairy lights. i want this new-found state of quiet grace. i want to be draped in your presence: a girl who never stays too long in a crowded city. a constant stranger. a new-found belief where good things end up and finally fall into place.

at last — something our hearts are cut out for.

today, demeter is nothing but
a bewildered ghost in a haunted meadow,
skinning flowers as they weep:
they're neatly lined as in an execution,
the creek, a boneyard,
a lair of sorrows for her dazed *******.

today, the sun desperately combs
through tree branches
for an abandoned nest of grief
but its hands just stray too far
and poke at a meadow's wound —
nails cutting through graying skin.

this is a poem written by a bystander.
this is a poem written by a witness.
this is a poem written by the victim.
the world blurs its lines today
and demeter is nothing
but a forgotten ghost
in a town painted new.

now my ribs recede with the heaviest sunsets; look and miss a missing body. look and miss an unmarked grave. right here where i lie indefinitely, there's no headstone grand enough to carve this grief into. there's a hand, repelled by a poem. there is a grief without a name.

My own skin — a skin that’s worn me out, I have scrubbed it raw and dry like a sorry imitation of Capitoline Venus, but statues manage to crumble so quietly, draped in wood dust and without so much as a heartbeat. And girls like me don’t know yet the weight of the things they have to lose: such as, 100 pounds — all bones, and coffee breaths, and yesterday's light straying, forgetting, falling off.

Now it has buried itself.

I am made of quiet storms washing themselves away.

i want to be as indiscernible as all my aches — as indefinite as the sorrows pressing down on my breastbone. i want to hush all the pain: loud, red, screaming — burning its way out of my throat. i want to crawl inside my own skin, until i feel nothing vaguely human — until bones and muscles dissolve into scattered, tender wounds. i want riddled endings; i want limbs taken down in such secrecy. i want the eeriness of my quiet hurting. i want to implode.

i feel myself in gradual decay with all these hoarded sorrows: a bad habit i inherited from my mom, embellished with my own kind of crazy, my own kind of lonely. my own kind of wasting away. i am half a sigh away from breaking. i am half a word away from being the next dead poet. how can some things, so small, carry such gravity? how can some things, so unremarkably quiet, carry something as heavy as my weighted skin, something as breakable as my resigned bones?

i have written so many poems; out they flow so heavily. out they flow like liquid lead. yet i remain full. i remain immovable. i remain a contradiction. i feel myself in gradual decay, unrelenting. in place. in the agony of total awareness.

and the air remains heavy — it remains heavy with all of me.

Sweet one, do I still owe you the same dreams?

I've grown kinder and gentler — inward. I've stepped out of my bruises, barefoot and cleansed: a mortal girl out of ***** foam. I've learned to soften the aching. I've learned to let go of things, including who I wasn't meant to be. I am no longer you. I am no longer your failures. Why then, do I still feel the need to chase the distant dreams you wished for? Is it because I still want them somehow — or because I feel like I owe those dreams to someone I no longer am?

peonies in soft decay — petal after petal
i've always looked my worst in the brightest, straying light,
and darling, it knows.

the dying world knows
who comes down to visit. to rot. to stay:

peonies in soft decay —
petal after petal

this kind of softness is an ugly one,
horrific under my thumbs,
a wet, brown, mush.

peonies in soft decay —
and darling, they know, the dying world knows:
i miss having flowers to taint —
petal after petal

after petal.

1
my spine is a bridge that burns —
bones most breakable, like memories of
driftwoods
collected as a kid,
i now feed to a bonfire
of blistered cyclamens.

2
my spine is a bridge
of no certain grandeur
nor history.
it burns away
and falls,
quietly in the night,
like an unknown laborer.

some of us die this way.

3
the reason for this poem
evades me,
but the heart must write of its sorrows
undisclosed to the soul.
they remain to be
unrecognized parts
of a burning town.

4
now, i speak in tongues
unfamiliar to myself.
i write a poem i'm bound to forget.
i stand in the baptism
of a child i do not know.
i do it anyway.

5
i bring her driftwoods
from the water, mourning under
a burning bridge;
soon the last beam falls apart
and i fall apart
in a forgettably graceless light
this: a sorrow with no name,
i write it anyway.

this: a sorrow undisclosed.
i tell it anyway.

this: a sorrow unrecognized.
i feel it anyway.

the dusk wastes its pity on me. in its muted retiring lights, i have learned a terrible habit of forcing poems out of my mouth,
when maybe all i wanna do is be as quiet as the wounds nesting inside my head.

pandora opens her chest at midnight:
it is a box left out in the rain,
a wound unstitched in despair for october,
a small voice hushed by forlorn hours.

and dead gods forget so easily,
but
pandora still opens her chest at midnight
and the walls huddle to look at an ugly wound
left open to bleed all over
dusty pink cosmos flowers.
and drapes huddle, too,
to look at a nest of sorrows creeping about,
as though a wake, a vigil,
a somber watch that only ends
with all of my bones breaking.

but dead gods forget so easily,
and dead girls forget so easily,
and i forget so easily
all the aching hours that had kissed my skin
and their graceless, moonlit pull,
and i am left to lie
languishing on soft, breakable spots.

and so pandora closes her chest:
a box to never be opened, a vault behind a frame.
a flash of stray light on a wound sealed shut. safe. secure.
there is no space for conspicuous melancholies.
there is no space for anything —
there is no space for hope.

and the gods forget so easily.

Eyes. Heartbreak is her sunlit memory barely held by a wooden clothespin. It hangs and glares before your eyes, mocking as it fades into an empty filmstrip. Heartbreak is a lost soul left to perish in her ghost-town, and warmer sunsets are lifetimes away. A wonderwall left standing, pinned polaroids, desperate scratches. You had fought hard and long, for this, but homes are made for breaking and crumbling and leaving, especially in the losing side.

Mouth. Heartbreak is a paper-tag of a goodbye caught in her lips. It is a metaphor that melts at the soft space under your tongue, a certain bittersweet taste made for drowning with a cold lager, a stranger’s whispers, and the perils of his unfiltered cigarette kiss. Heartbreak is taming a manic scream into a delicate, defeated sigh, out of sync with the way she breathed. But then sighing still hurts, and breathing still hurts because you’re alive – you’re so ******* alive for this unbuffered pain.

Chest. Heartbreak is begging your chest not to break amid a listzomaniac rush. Heartbreak is a prosaic throbbing, a treacherous ***** stuck in your ribs, begging to be held like it doesn’t hurt. Heartbreak is a site of buried lavender lithiums, asking for a eulogy; but silence is equally as oppressive. It is your body betraying you, like a city undone by its smokes. It is a quiet word – not a poem, because poems are beautiful despite the pain, and this isn’t. This isn’t.

Hands. Heartbreak is your shaky hand flipping through the last three pages of a tragedy — a heroine dies, a stray star falls, a maiden leaves on a horse-drawn carriage. There is no changing of the ending. Heartbreak is reaching for the empty space in bed, leaving your fingers in technicolored bruises. How can emptiness break one’s bones? Heartbreak is scrubbing your skin dry, raw, and untouchable where she once laid her kisses. Heartbreak is your nails digging through her letters in utter despair — for invisible ink, a promise in the postscript, an estranged lover in familiar flesh, only to find torn sheets, spilled wine, and finality.

Legs. Heartbreak is coming home to ***** laundry all over these cold, wistful floors. Heartbreak is walking in hushed tiptoes only to trip and fall down a memory lane – a kaleidoscope of all the wounds that can possibly hurt. It is catching an empty train to somewhere unloving her is possible – doable. Heartbreak is teaching your legs to run away from the chaos of her naked skin, and not to fall at her feet. But still, you fall and you fall and you break what’s left of your bones chasing after something that’s already gone – long before it has said goodbye. So turn your back and hold your heart — it breaks harder, louder, and worse before it settles down and sits as quiet aching: a forgotten filmstrip, a soundless breath, a calm poem, a serene night.

I'll always be the uncertainty
in a liminal space known only to your feet —
the one you'll always cross
only to step on fragile ground.
I am the kiss mark buried deep
in the hollow of your throat, darling,
the intoxicating Scorpio Venus hands
that aim to unravel, to claim,
the chase slipping off your fingers,
as you still in bewilderment
all the same time.

Skin me dearly, breathe me in
before I go,
in earnest longing;
I have a bad habit of leaving —
yet lingering like the scent
of your brother's cigarettes.

Yet you always come back
knocking at my door at midnight —
and I always have waited for you, darling —
I always have waited for you
in strange, barely escapable hours.

This, an unveiled obscurity — an epiphany, darling.
Our enigma and clarity that perhaps —
perhaps you've always been mine to love.

— "and I, yours"

I'll always feel in my chest broken Septembers. I am languishing with the days, head first to a point of no return. I am the ghost of an abducted goddess, the one who bled all over saffrons and still holds on to her sorrows. I bid farewell to the sunglow on wildflowers. I bid farewell to daylit copper fields. I bid farewell to golden hours, as down I descend to the sweetest madness, and up it goes to consume me.

this cold sunrise will choke on all the dark, sunless ways that i am in love you. sweet one, let's watch the light as it falls apart and crawl, like ether on our golden skin. this is us sitting in the last of september's lights — this is us in the finitude of poetry, and i have never seen anything as beautiful.

the butterflies and their dusted wings — they're sore under my tongue. i inherited the sting of my mother's wounds — her sunday madness and propensity for hurting. but not quite her bravery. not quite her capacity to carry such wounding weights. i am a washed-out silhouette. i cower, with lips blood-red from a tourmaline graze. i shake, i buckle, i drown, and sink. how then, do i say my words without turning them into a gospel made for wasteaways? how do i become half a woman she ever was? how do i live with myself?

long are these cold, clear nights of sobriety and awareness. long are these cold, oppressive seconds. i pull this dilapidated skin — wrap it all over me, resembling an unclaimed body in a morgue. solace exists, but solely outside these walls.

Melt me into a thousand, reflective sighs. I ache for such sweet release — hypnotic, cathartic. I want to see myself drown once — with my life flashing in a slow-spinning liquid mirrorball. Just once in such graceful, calm, permanent surrender. Just once, and for the last time.

oh, what would i not give for you to gut open the poems — gut them out of me. what softness would i not stain? which bones would i not break? i look at my outstretched limbs — look for the parts i wouldn't hurt, but their silence has always been ominous. foreboding. anticipating. like wary, unmoving leaves. like quiet crows. like haunted dusks.

i spin among formless silhouettes. what would i taint?

what would i not?

this is love stripped of poetry, so here darling, i might as well just rip out my chest because not loving you is the last act of self-inflicted violence. how i rue the days. i might as well just rip my chest out and give you my heart — burrow your way under my skin, like wood dusts drawn to the wounds in my heels. i will give up poetry to be loved by you in ways not dreamy. in ways raw. sober. aware. unadulterated. lawless. infinite. in intense, longing gazes. in ways that stray from falling apart so beautifully, in such chest-tearing grace. in ways that stain tenderness. in ways that crash and burn.

my love, catch me. watch me tear down the world in the name of your eyes. watch me tear down poetry. i have no need for it.

i spent too many times trying not to love you, darling, but i know this now: loving you has always been in my very nature — repressed and buried in my bone marrows.

i'm sorry it took me so long to realize this, my love. i am coming home now. ❤️

august is a map of my fullest aches. it always has heartbreaks for me to feel. it is all the wrong lights hitting all my wrong angles and now i'm facing a mirror of my body covered in torn traces of breaths — an empty space, a backdrop for a sight of star dusts lingering. august is a map of my feet where the sea has buried technicolored glasses — all swelling, all wounds dulled by the salt and the summer rain. soon, august will all wear off like a cruel high; it's done seeing me mourning, and i'll be an empty shell for september to wash away.

walk past me in the shallow seas. walk past me in full aching state. walk past me — look past; i long to be a ghost of something delicate, something not terrifying, something that doesn't haunt.

i am looking at it now from afar — that certain kind of pain that would mirror mine; how immense it must be to go through it, and i can only imagine getting out. how immense the pain must be, how terrible, to wish for a kind of comfort only a certain, abrupt finality can bring. i am looking at it now from afar: skin as gray as mine and lately, the daybreak just brings in its rays more nights for us to swallow.

if it brings you any semblance of a cold comfort — the one you seek, i hope you know, i'll die in your place. i wish i can take it all away.

i stand in a pit of deep anxiety,
its shapeless form outweighs
all the sunsets i stored
inside my skin —
for keeping,
for the dark.
my arms outstretched towards its colors
are last bits of innocence
the only part untainted,
the only part that doesn't flinch —
at the voices,
the movements,
the arms clawing from below.

six feet deep —
maybe a higher number,
people cannot mourn what they cannot see.
soon these spare lights, these spare words, this spare comfort,
they will all dissolve into a shapeless, formless,
state of corruption;
i am a body, hazy in a jar
dumped at the back of an anthropology museum.
preserved, not rotting —
people do not mourn things that do not rot.
and mourning is all i do in a suspended time,
in a time that moves and doesn't wait.

i stand in a pit — on my feet
with twisted legs and washed-out skin.
i still, as though before a mirror
seeing this weight in full clarity —
it shows in my face, blank as a sheet of ***** ice
where i am buried in.
i still, in my pit, my feet, staring:

the rest of the world is shapeless as it moves past me,
formless as it walks by.

my skin has always been mine to break. it is a crime scene i can never flee, and i have to live with the fact of being both the perpetrator and the victim. i am an inconspicuous shadow melting in a rustic kitchen, waiting to escape — waiting to be found, and this anguished aching has begun to chew on my fingertips, like a bleaching agent yet, some things always leave a trace. some things always leave a trace. some things always leave a trace. my hidden scars, my manic letters, striking in their blood-red words, my hair all chopped off like diseased dahlia stems. my fingerprints, like the sins of a roman governor washed in vain. my loudest angers. my quiet hurting.

some things always leave a trace. i wish i can dissassemble my body and carefully lay myself — all detached pieces, on a dinner table, and wipe myself with a washcloth. i wish i can wipe myself and lo, i am good as new. i wish i can wipe myself spotless. i wish i can wipe myself clean.

sunset has me by the neck but not everything it lays on becomes beautiful and healed. all i do is curl my body into a small, tight space where the dusk begins and spreads. all i do is sigh my sorrows. all i do choke, and heave, and ache, at best — in full bright, bruising technicolors.

Your hands are a spare room for grass blades and wilting flowers —
they wound just the same now,
die just the same.
One day we will too.
I breathe you in,
stale air and brimstone fill my lungs
like the flood that came after us —
it has our name on it:
a misguided retribution.

I remember leaving,
the soil turning parched as our soles,
the shadows' first treason,
the cold, cold air,
the distance between our clothed body,
drifting away like continents.
Soon, you will speak in tongues,
a language you cannot love me in
and still, I'll call your name, softly,
like a desperate counter-curse.

I am still here,
a darkened rib for the devil to collect.
I am yours first, before I am his.
But you are worth the fire and the first sin it's ever seen
the crash site, the rock shards buried on my arms —
I am good as a dead woman — a wide-eyed mortal
I will walk to you on skipping stones,
sinking stones
with my bones set on fire and the world up in flames —
this is our undoing in the colors of a sunset
but it's nothing we've seen before.

I know good. I know evil.
I know flames and the way it burns. I know death and its finality.
I know a lot of things now,
but only one of them matters, Adam —

I know you are worth the fall.

My words don't know peace. They are the nightshades all over a hunting ground. They are the bending of sunlight as it slices itself against headstones. They are a patchwork of all the cruel things I've done with my hands. They are the birds of prey, circling overhead a wounded doe. My words don't know peace — they are made of every last bit of my chaos, barely contained by my fingers. They are made of every last bit of my violence made to look nonthreatening. Gentle as the wind and tame as a field of roses — the thorns, left buried in your back.

Still, a refugee trembles, hides beneath her battle scars. She recognizes the wars waged in her skin — the cruel way they stay long after the last battle — the cruel way they don't know peace.

You’re everything bad for me; our idea of love is crashing into sunburnt, rust walls, with hands around each other’s neck. There we are, soaked in each other’s sadness. There we are, all cold, mechanical limbs until we can no longer tell whose hand does the breaking – whose skin is left with scars. There we are, silhouettes jumping off Ferris wheels straight into the fray – all broken bones and the maddest smile.

This is love – in its ugliest form.
You’re everything bad for me; you’re every terrible idea – every wrong decision made seconds before going haywire.

And yet, maybe, you’re not – maybe it’s me.

Maybe it’s me; I lived to come undone and fall apart to your autumn eyes. Maybe it’s me: cold, dilapidated skin after all the havocs you wreaked, and still, I would stand and run to you – despite all this knowing – all this hurting. So darling, break me – leave me in ruins, for another life to see.

I wasn’t good for myself anyway.

Your poems no longer talked about the way you fell so gracefully in the cracks of my collar bones — fragile, hollowed as the echoes of a priestess’ word — my chest is a shrine built just for you. Your poems no longer talked about the way I kissed the sunset lights, laid softly on your shoulders; this love has descended from the gods. Your poems no longer talked about pressed roses — dead and desperate on top of love letters, god was I high on loving you.

Your poems no longer talked about these. They no longer talked about us darling; they no longer talked about my rosewood scent on your pillow the first time we made love. They no longer talked about how we chased the sun and descended back to the ground, like cosmic dusts losing themselves.

Your poems no longer talked about us — we are dead. dead. dead — a forgotten language and its metaphors. We are walking on top of a new city, a pile of words buried underneath. Our love buried underneath. You are walking on top of a new city, all new words and a slim fit suit.

I am quiet as a Syrian poem. I am buried underneath.