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.

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.

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.

How many more girls should die in my poems just so I don't become one of them? How many more girls should die by their hands each time I felt like dying by mine?

Nights now belong to January, and I have started losing count.

i am half of a sun-dried breath short of being sane. i sigh and my body bathes in a mouthful of bleeding, blue december — i can feel its colder, longer days stretching inside me.

i wish january comes here soon — in fresh, comforting, yellow warmth.

such softness i covet compulsively, and yet all i can do is watch myself dig a mass grave for the white tulips i ripped apart. watch myself crumble like weathered obsidians. watch myself unbottle self-addressed apologies, and choke on all the softness i never had —

until all there is is my skin, drenched in ghostly disquiet.
until all there is is an ugly sight of breaths, hoarded as they fall.
until all there is is just breaking.

and until all there is,




is 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?

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.

it's been ten years — ten long years but all around me lies this casual atrocity of how easy it is to slip back into sadness, as though it’s the only thing my body knows well

My hands still remember the quiet aching of these wounds — too deep and wide for stitches and shaky hands. And so, I never learned to unpack my grief. It still is in a suitcase with December dusks and dreary summers — shut in secret library walls. I never learned to unpack my grief because I'm terrified that when I do, it'll be way too messy to place it back where it belongs.


Some things, we never tell ourselves out loud.

There were midnights when I could still tell you about my dreams. Of course, they were always about us — marvelling at the colors of the sky. With you, standing under the sun and getting lost in the afterglows and collapsing with the black holes sounded romantic. One night, I would dream about reading the books we collected together. Other nights, I would dream of kissing the tips of your lashes inside our blanket forts in terry cloth robes and Birth of Venus and Starry Night socks. Regardless, we would be up at 5 am — you with your whole bean coffee, listening to the tales authored in my sleep.

Except that in my dreams, it still feels like her instead of you. It always does. So tonight, I hope you keep yourself warm and touch the dream catcher tattoo on your nape and not think of me anymore. I know that I'm the reason for your sleepless night and memories dressed in nightmares, but tonight, I hope that you go back to sleep and no longer dream of the love I fabricated. And when it's 5 am, I hope you realize that you need something a little better than my dreams. I hope you brew your coffee to the right strength and no longer look at where I used to sit to tell you my daytime stories. So go back to sleep now. You'll be okay — without the what if's and the dreams and the happy ending written in our name. You'll be okay, darling.

You'll be okay without me.

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

i wish knowing you're not worth the words is enough to make me stop writing about you.

but apparently, it's not.

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.

she had a darkness in her chest space shuttles hadn't explored.
it was said that stars died there.

If I had it my way, I would leave myself behind.

out there is the vast, primordial space. empty. infinite. timeless. and for billions of years, the stars had been killing themselves.

sweet one, isn't that very telling?

I am made of quiet storms washing themselves away.

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.

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.

And maybe all I need is my 30-year old self to come here right now and tell me that everything will be okay, and that I made it.

— “I would’ve totally done that for my 13-year old self”

sad poems look a little like you.

I know I have been okay for a while now, but it feels odd — not knowing how to handle being okay. I have been held captive by the emptiness — the kind that consumes you from the inside out. I have been that girl, trapped in a skin, and my wrists have become the walls she scratches whenever she tries to escape.

I have fallen apart with sunsets to déjà vus I have long forgotten, and my brain — it has become Eris incarnate and my body — her armless prey, walking willingly into her trap. I have been Ophelia, tiptoeing on a willow tree and drowning in a lake of deep, black butterflies. So being okay and all this — it doesn't feel right at all, and maybe it's possible to despair for sadness. Maybe it's possible to morph with the darkness I thought I wanted to escape. Maybe it's possible to ache for self-destruction with an intensity I've never known before.. I no longer know what's wrong with my brain, but maybe it's possible to feel so lost, so broken, so messed up for so long — that being whole feels like a mistake.

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.

i.
i carve the sadness out of my ribs like well-soaked marrows;
they fall off like a drunken secret —
a poem within a poem within a night-long quietude

that i disturb
like a child's stomping feet among the prairie dusk.

ii.
i carve a poem,
whole and out of my tightened throat
like a reverse magic trick,
but my hands break in casual irony.
i carve a word out of my tongue
but all it does is bleed.

iii.
i carve a feeling out of a callus but
my paper-skin is left too long under a lavender storm
to still write letters like these.

iv.
the sky cries to a drunken oblivion
as i unwrite this poem in indifference.
i let myself go, like that

dead houseplant drooping in corner of my room

and cheerless, quiescent sheets
watch to pass time.

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.