sad poems look a little like you.

I have a bad habit
of falling for
messed up people.
Maybe it’s because
my own sadness
recognizes theirs.

So darling, let's fall in love

and apart.

and you ruined me,
way before those filthy hands
and forced kisses had,
way before cigarettes,
and hangovers,
way before my poems
fetishized
my unhappiness,
before best friend break-ups
and pretty boys
who couldn't
love themselves
and me.

you see, it was you
who ruined me first,
way before
all of them ever did.
it was you
who ruined me first,
way before
everything else did,
way before
life did,
and way before
i
did.

and sometimes, i still wish
you weren't my first heartbreak

lost souls don't end up in asphodel meadows, honey —
they end up in your apartment;
a messy, poorly-lit place.
or so i did.
our systems filled
with nicotine and other bad ideas
i will for sure regret.

well, truth be told,
you're mine to regret.

well truth be told,
you're not.

but there we were,
flung in a den of frenzied kisses —
skin next to a black hole,
a black hole next to a skin
guess we'll never know which is who.
but tonight break me —

we both know this isn't your
watching-sunset-and-gazing-at-stars
type of love.

so tonight stain me,
and i'll call it a pseudo-romance, darling
and maybe after,
we can smoke cigarettes
or watch the city fall asleep
or stare at each other's empty eyes;
maybe somehow that's more of our style
darling, than staring at the sunrise is.

but at this moment i know,
in this poorly-lit place,
dripping roofs,
***** sinks,
that i will waste my words writing
beautiful poetry for you,
even if i'm not that beautiful myself.

even if you're not that beautiful yourself.

even if we're not that beautiful ourselves.

writing you poems feels like relapsing into self-destruction

i am a tender wound made of stitches —
bleeding at each
and every bit of touch.

so tell me, how far
and for how long
should I run
to escape from everything
that ever hurt?

how,

when I am everything
that ever hurt?

you —
kissing the scars on my skin;
such a delicate, carefully crafted
form of poetry, honey,
i will lay it down apollo's altar.

your lips.
my wrists.

again.
and again.

and for a moment there,
they don't look like
a bedlam of veins cut open.
for a moment there,
they look nowhere near
the metaphors
used in place of my self-destruction.

And I spent years crying over people who could not love me enough, only to realize I was one of them.

how do you gaze at the rabbit hole in your chest without falling down into it?

mental illness hides itself in the unwashed laundry spread on your bed and on the bedroom floor. it hides itself in the dust that settled on your favorite books and in the permanent markers on your powder-blue walls; it hides itself in skipped meals and in the messy hair you hadn’t washed for a week now and in the chorus of your favorite song you no longer sang to. it hides itself in your favorite constellation — in the night skies and star clusters you stopped gazing at and in those vanilla ice creams that no longer felt comforting.

mental illness is fickle, sweetie, for it hides in bad dye jobs and unopened birthday letters and in dishes piling on the sink. it hides in your limbal rings while you look at those sunsets that feel like summer storms. it hides under your skin while you stand under the shower, wondering why you even bother to bathe, or when you freeze in the middle of street, waiting for the bus to come. it hides in mornings you force yourself to get up and clean your room.

we know it, don’t we? it hides in trivial things. it hides in places people won’t look at, sweetie. it hides in proses like these

our falling apart isn’t like having heartbreak lines sitting on my chest, waiting to be written when i wake up and realize you’re gone. it isn’t like sinking into the absence of your coffee-scented lips on my temple, or walking into a dust storm caught in the sunbeams in your room. it isn’t like those cold, two a.m. nights where you find yourself singing stay with derek sanders and breaking down into a puddle of unbearable pain, hoping that each guitar strum will take you away from our memories.

no, our falling apart isn’t like that. it isn’t immaculate.

it isn’t an indie-film-kinda-heartbreak, nor is it poetic.

you see, we fell apart simply because you loved me — you loved me so ******* much, darling.

and i wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

Alice had forgotten what happiness felt like. It’s been long since hers plummeted to rabbit holes with non-existent Wonderlands — hers plummeted to rabbit holes, from which it was never again able to climb back from.

Tell a little girl that her coily hair is beautiful when all of her playmates think otherwise. Marvel at a little boy’s drawings when everyone else he shows them to is too busy to spare a glance. Compliment someone’s floral dress in the subway; compliment someone’s smile, someone’s art, someone’s cooking, someone’s gumamela flowers soup they made especially for you. Thank someone for the songs they introduced, for the songs that now have become your shower jams and lullabies. Tell someone that you think they’re amazing and smart, especially if they don’t think so of themselves.

In a world where everyone looks past a street singer and ignores the old man painting sunsets in a park, be that someone who isn’t afraid to tell people about the beautiful things in them. Be that someone who isn’t afraid to be soft to others. Be that someone who isn’t afraid to be kind.

you are so much more than the days you can't create or write anything.

those days where you lift your pen, press it against the emptiness of the sheet. those days where you are drenched in the skies' grayest clouds and the colors and lines won't sew you a silver lining. those days where the spines of your favorite books hold no magic. those days where inaction and emptiness will swallow you whole. those days where sunsets are just a discord of colors, and the night skies are just a discord of stars, and the poems are just a discord of words and you, just a discord of vacuums — you are so much more than all of these days. and today, it's okay to not be able to create anything.

today, it's your turn to be the art — it's your turn to be the poetry.

darling, my notebooks are running out of strings and pages; how many more poems do i have to write before you come back?

I want my love to remind you of the first stars you see during the nightfall, of the movie soundtracks you sing under the shower, of the words from a book you can’t put down, of the scenes you remember from a half-forgotten dream.

I want my love to remind of you the first sunrise we saw together from my bed, of the coffee blend that made you realize you loved coffee, and of riding buses during sunsets, and of the first flowers that came right from your soul.

I want my love to remind you that despite its harshness and sadness, there is something kind and soft and gentle in this world, darling — and that you can call it home.

i’m so sick of cigarette poems and ***** poems and midnight coffee poems and summer rain poems

and all poems

that remind me of you.




well, they all remind me of you.

And once and for all, I just want someone to tell my whole story to — all my realities and lies, all my lived experiences and suppressed wishes, my secrets, my regrets, my fears, my victories and my losses. I just want someone who’ll keep a record of who I was and who I am, in case I don’t make it — in case all of it fades with me tonight.

With me, you don’t have to dip every word on a honeycomb or flip through tattered pages looking for unused metaphors or make sure that every line is in its most poetic form. Darling, I don’t even want poetry or structured sonnets and all that cliché crap with coffee cups and sheets.

With you, I want the raw — the grammatical slips and the illegible penmanships and the 3 am honesty and the ****** up, messed up thoughts when you’re angry at the world. Darling, with you, I want the things poets don’t write — things poets don’t read.

Maybe I left my dreams in the last song I sang in the shower. Maybe you left yours in your first, half-empty cigarette pack, still hidden beneath a pile of clothes.

Maybe somewhere along the way, it wasn’t our dreams that died, darling — it was us.

death by burning knows no era
and my demons have long
set me on fire.

i feel like a witch burning at the stake —
burning and screaming for too long now,
but give it time and maybe
even my nerves can learn to be numb,
even the lick of flames can grow cold;

and maybe even the ashes can feel like home.

I'm drunk and the skies are a little hazy, and the stars, a little like Van Gogh's, but tonight, I'm still an astronaut angling metaphors from the mesophere and you're still the moon to which these poems orbit around.

you always ask why i always stay in my room, in that voice that always made me feel small and vulnerable — the one that always made me feel like a five-year-old girl wishing that the blankets and the stars will hush the thunders.

you always ask why, dad, and yet you always find ways to hurt me the moment i come out of this four-walled shell, ashen and gray from all the storm clouds circling over my head. you always find ways to spot the cracks on my skin, like i was just another wall in this crumbling house. you always find ways lasso your words around my throat — tighter and tighter, i can no longer breathe. you always find ways to unhinge my mind; to unbottle all the tears and all the loose pieces of my heart hastily stitched out of place.

dad, i am caught in a trojan war brewed by my demons, and you are paris, piercing all of my achilles heels; stitched; tender; still healing from all the poisoned arrows you shoot — a year ago. two years ago. three. four. and for years and years, you always find ways to crush me, like the cans of your empty beer. you always find ways to crack and snap this bent framework; my bones are broken from the weight of your words. you always find ways to hurt me and hurt me and hurt me and hurt me again — like i was never the little girl you played dolls and cooking sets with; like i was never the little girl you watched disney movies with. like i was never the little girl you used to love — dad, i am still she, now trapped in the body of an adult. i am still she, now trapped in the prison of a dusty room you unknowingly co-erected. and i guess i'll stay right here where i'm trapped, but safe. i guess i'll stay right here where the voices only come from my demons.

i'll stay right here where you can't see me.

i'll stay right here where i'm not hurt.

girls like her won’t break you — girls like her will make you weekly playlists, and write you poems as you sit together on museum floors, and watch your favorite movies, and introduce you to new songs, and steal your hoodie while you read your long-pending books, and drag you out of bed at 2 am’s to watch the stars fall to the earth, and kiss you, right there and then.



and then, they break you.

honey you never loved me, you simply loved having someone you could write poetry about.



and i gave you that.

“You needed someone who could fix you.”

A pause filled the air after I had said those words — not because we didn’t know what to say, but because we knew it was the truth. Sometimes, there was no way out of the truth.

You needed someone who could fix you — someone who would make you a playlist of the favorite songs you’d thought you’d already forgotten — someone who would take you to museums and laugh as you spill coffee on its clean floors. You needed someone who would look at you like you’re made of tiny poems caught between their eyelashes, someone who would hold your hand as the mountaintops melt into silhouettes from the rearview mirror, someone who would give you a box of a hundred hand-written things they love about you. Darling, you needed someone who could fix you — someone you could live for. And we both knew that I wasn’t that person, for darling, what I needed was someone I could fall apart and crumble with. What I needed was someone who looked close to my demons, someone who could crush my snow globes and trace poems on my skins with all its broken bits. I needed someone I could watch the summer nights fade into repetitive dawns. Darling, I needed someone who I could stay broken with and yet still feel human and whole.

And regardless of how much we could try to love each other, my hands would always find their way back to placing cigarettes between your lips. Your hands would always find their way back to writing poems for someone who could save you — and honestly, I no longer even know how to be someone you’d still write poems about. So I would say it again. You needed someone who could fix you. You needed someone who would fix you.



And all this time, I needed someone who wouldn’t fix me.

and tonight, we no longer walk under the dripping yellows of the moonlight —
for the moon, it comes in phases.

but who i am, and who you are, and who we love
do not.

and tonight, we are made of half-darkness and half-stars borrowed from the night skies
but tomorrow, the colors of the daytime
will wash away the relics of this night

and darling, we’ll come out like the sun.

we’ll come out like the sun.

I have been waiting for that bus that will take me rides away, from this town drenched in all the depressing shades of blue. Maybe I can reach the point where I’ll look at the rearview mirror, and no longer feel sorry for my younger self and all the hurting she did alone. Maybe I can finally disentangle myself from all forms of sadness I slept with. Maybe I can take the trip with the longest ride and make it out of here.

But I’m still stuck in the same old station, along with other runaways. And it’s getting late. It’s getting late.

so that’s why you settle with friends who treat you like crap. that’s why you chase after heartbreaks in the form of long hair and lop-sided smiles. that’s why you’re on your seventh cigarette. that’s why you don’t want your scars erased, why you stay in a place where nobody asks if you’re okay and call it home, why you write wretched poems about bleeding wrists and tripping on *** bottles from last night.

darling, you hold onto pain. you hold onto pain, because you no longer know what it feels like living without it.