and there are still weekend mornings
when your absence is twice as heavy
to be written on my thickest notebook sheets,

and there are still weekday mornings
when i mistake someone else’s phone call
for yours,
and that the empty space in bed
looks just like the days
when you would get up to greet the sun

and there are still mornings
when it feels like
we’re just movie-dates and serenades
away from making up
and from breaking each other’s hearts again
only to call it love

but

your name is now
someone else’s synonym
for morning coffees and unmade beds
and arrows for a wrist tattoo.

and darling, i still bleed
from the paper cuts
and the last ten poems
i wrote for you.

Take me back
to the tattered pages of your books
where gray roses grew.
Take me back
to the school grounds where
we used to break all the rules,
to the unmarked graves
of the promises we no longer said
after we had broken them
one
by
one,
and to the road trips
where you felt like
winter dipped in sadness
and I,
a love song flung
to the summer sun.

Take me back to where
we drowned in the coldest mornings,
to where the sunrise looked like
magic spells cast
by the daybreaks in our eyes.
Take me back to the seas where
we built castles on the horizon
and waited for
the sun to sink.
Take me back to the spring-break bars
where the poems melted on our skin,
to the darkest hallways
where cigarettes almost looked like stars,
and to the broken beds
where we kissed
and kissed
and kissed
for a while
and said forever.
Forever.

Take me back to where that word ended, darling.
Take me back to us —
or at least take me away.
Take me far
far away,

so that I may forget our places,
so that I may forget we were ever there,
so that I may forget they were ever ours,
and that love was ever ours
and that we
were ever ours.

i have a universe in my chest;
the one without the stars and satellites
and galaxies,
and sometimes, i tell myself
it doesn’t exist

it doesn’t exist

it doesn’t exist.

sometimes, i wanna believe that.

but.

there are nights when the void
is getting harder to ignore
and the way my stomach sinks
feels so much like
sinking into merging black holes,
and i breathe
the way pluto breathes
and darling, they say
that poems about the universe
are romantic.

until it isn’t.

until it consumes you from the inside.

until you see the moons in their planets
and the planets in their orbits,
and the nebulae flung from dying stars.

and there you are
light years away,
falling
and falling,
and falling,

into the black hole.
into the void.


into your chest.

the thing with falling in love with a poet
is that only the heartbreak is good enough
to qualify as poetry.
all the roller-coaster rush
and the picnics on the hill
and the first time your hands brush together
on your first date and they take yours
to fill the gaps between their finger,
and the aimless walks looking for
somewhere to eat
and the first time they said i love you
but it wasn’t perfect
so they’d written you a poem
because that seemed closer
to perfect
than those three words —
somehow, at some point,
all of these gets overlooked
like words in a history book
he wouldn’t read even if he was stuck with it in a dream.

the thing with falling in love with a poet
is that it is falling in love with a stranger
who writes poetry at 8 am or 10 pm, hoping
to find his lover back in front of him
when he reaches the last word and raises up his head.
it is falling in love
with someone whose walls seem to echo
the first time they said i love you
three years ago,
it is falling in love with someone
who could still be writing about the love of his life
and sometimes, the consonants
in her name
look like the
vowel in yours
but it’s not you, honey,
sometimes,
it’s just
not you.

he said i shouldn’t mistake
falling in love with his words
for falling in love with him,
so i thought
how could that be, when his words
were the words i wanted to kiss?
how could that be, when he was
the poetry i wanted to read?

one time,
i asked him if he would write me a poem
if he ever fell out of love.

and he said he would never fall out of love.

and he did.

without any warning —
without any melancholic farewell,
or messy kisses on the kitchen floor,
or desperate pleads for us to stay.
he fell out of love with me —
without writing any heartbreak poem;

but then again, maybe it was because
all heartbreak poems, even if it was us falling apart,
would still be written for you.

the night he left,
he forgot to take his poetry collection
all written in the tattered pages
of that black notebook i got him,
and it was full of pages folded in halves
and it was full of your name in lazy scribbles
and it was full of his words
wanting you back.

it was the night we broke up
yet it was still you, breaking his heart —

it was the night he decided he could no longer pretend
he loved me.
it was the night he decided he could no longer pretend
i was you.

you stood there with sadness
braided to your locks,
and i was pretty used to making homes out of sadness,
and your eyes — they made me think
of both writing poems and running away;
i chose the former
and you chose to smile;
and smiling back felt like jumping
inside a book found in the bottom
of shared beer bottles,
and yet, we read it sober
with our fingers touching
when we’d turn to the next page
and darling, that was how we met.

and there we were gazing at the stars
wrapped in a sunset;
and we named them love
written for a wolf
trapped in a girl’s skin
and a girl dressed
in bleeding moonlights
and together,
we crashed into a fray, unworthy
of being written poems about.
and i loved you so f*cking much,
and even more so because
you couldn’t love yourself
and darling, kissing wasn’t
the most romantic thing we ever did —
it was running away from the world
and darling, that was how
we fell in love.

and running away
was our kind of poetry,
and running away got tiresome
after four books and a couple of heartaches.
and we ended.
abruptly.
like an anticlimactic poem
written by fading silhouettes
atop an abandoned building
as the rest of the world
caught fire and crashed down.
and there you were,
a piece of a debris
escaping my lips and sinking down,
like words in the middle
of a poem i could no longer write,
and i, a pronoun
you could no longer love.
and that was how
we became ashes
without dancing with the flames —
how we became a million pieces
of broken kisses
inside a poem made for two.

and that was how
we became strangers again, darling —

and that was how
i
lost
you.

if we're all about
lazy, blanket-cuddles
mixed with Radiohead songs
and missing breakfast
in the morning,

if we're all about playing
Russian roulettes with
our anxiety triggers
and chasing them down
with *****,

if we're all about
untouched calendars
and jokes that aren't funny
and telling them anyway
and not saying
i love you's,

then,
i love what we're all about.
i love not saying
i love you's
with you.
i love this
kind of us.

please, touch me everywhere
it hurts.
touch these 300 cuts,
more or less,
my ribs —
breaking like museum columns,
my lips —
chapped from being sober
for a week.
please, touch me,
until misery feels
less familiar
than happiness.
touch me until deep talks
aren't about dying,
until walking away from life
feels less profound
than walking away
from omelas.

please, touch me everywhere
it hurts, darling;
i want to go through
all my breakdowns
in your arms.

please, touch me everywhere it hurts.

please touch me.

everywhere.

maybe when fate decides
to be kind once more,
we can dance again
under a cloud of star glows
and pose **** for each other’s art

but for now,
you’re crafting “i love you’s”
you no longer wanted to say,
and i’m trapped in a skin
you no longer wanted to feel.

Our first kiss was crossing California’s fault lines
thinking that we wouldn't fall;
it was an it-just-feels-right, spur-of-the-moment,
it-might-never-happen-again kinda kiss.
Our second kiss was running away from home
to dance under thunderstorms;
gasps lost in a hurricane’s howl
and there we were, in the eye,
figure skaters dancing tentatively on thawing ice.
Our third one was starting to look like a bad decision,
but boy, did we like making one.
Our fourth kiss was still a ***** secret,
but it made me think of strawberries and forevers
and how they tasted so good in your mouth.
Our fifth kiss happened at 8 on a Sunday,
preceding a fight on why platonic people
even think of kissing.
And there I was, wishing you'd stay
and crash your lips into mine again,
but maybe chapped lips and hot breaths
can no longer burn walls.
Our sixth had gaps that almost tasted
like leaving but it lingered,
the way you didn't,
and for the first time,
it was like fitting a piece in a different jigsaw puzzle.
Our seventh was all, desperate and pleading
and memorizing the feel of your lips and chin
and cupid's bow.
Our eighth was an insignia of
all our blunders coming undone.
Our ninth kiss tasted of cigarettes,
and someone else,
and it was the last;
our tenth simply had never come.

And I still know by heart,
the way we breathed
with the sunlight scattering
off the sky,
and the way reds refracted
off your lips, darling
and off our eventual demise,
and the way i stole your first rain-kiss
and you stole it
back from mine.

And I still remember
the letters drenched
in the sea and the summer rain,
and the coffee stains
on unmade beds,
and the coastlines where
we’re yet to stay.

And I still miss the setting sun,
and the saltwater-rush
mixed with regrets
and the mornings we became the sea foams
lit by stars
and cigarettes.

But maybe it’s the sunset’s turn to love you, darling,

and it’s our turn
to set.

i have a graveyard of letters;
relics dug up from plath’s oven
now, trapped
in the gaps of my ribs,
paper-cutting through the bones;

some are reduced to debris
coming undone like angels,
falling from crumbling buildings —
crumbling minds —
columns that snap
like they’re the threads of my life

nevermind the punctures,
nevermind the fall;
broken spines
and fractured bones —

they all hurt
just the same.

nevermind the metaphors,
nevermind the words;

poetries,

and suicide notes —

they all look
just the same.