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.

And I hope one day, you meet her in some historic street, or in an old bookstore, or in some countryside field, and I hope she loves the way you speak with your lisp, and I hope she likes the films you like, and I hope she writes you poetry at 2 am. And I hope her words finally feel like the kind of home you’ve been looking for — the kind of home you’ll grow old in and never leave, and the one you never found in me.

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.

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.

cigarettes still taste a little like our last kiss — like it's 5 am again and we were stuck in rusty rooftops, waiting for the break of dawn, or for the other to initiate the kiss. that being said, i always wished that 5 am's lasted longer, and that cigarettes burned longer, and that we kissed longer. but before we knew it, the sun had risen and there we were, ashing our cigarettes on the floor, kissing our last kiss. but here i am, darling — yours for the breaking; my cigarettes, yours for the taking — so kiss me again. break me again. leave me again.

say goodbye to me, darling. say goodbye, just once again.

and they say a black hole weighs millions of solar masses; i don't know where that weight comes from. maybe it's from the guilt taken off the shoulders of the primordial gods, or from the chaos of the dying stars, or from the essence of every creature to ever live in this sad, bleak universe, and in the ones parallel to it.

and yet somehow, this celestial phenomenon has found its way inside my skin, and inside yours, and inside everyone's. and in some way darling, we've become the black holes we've learned to tame.

there are days when my room turns into an ocean and i, a shipwreck of the person i used to be. i know i'm supposed to save myself — they tell me i'm supposed to clutch onto a lifeline of heartbeats attached to the shore, that i'm supposed to drain these night-tides dry. but my sadness is born from the seafoam and the seafoam — it's everywhere.

it's everywhere.

they tell me i'm supposed to save myself, that i'm supposed to sink my maelstroms on the bleakest of the sea beds. but how do i tell them that i am the maelstrom that needs destroying? how do i tell them that i have become the love child of melancholia and of the ocean after the storm? they tell me i'm supposed to live — i tell myself i'm supposed to live. but today, i'm quite okay with sinking into the depths the ocean floor.

today, i'm quite okay with not saving myself. today, i'm quite okay with drowning.

Somewhere in these long, midnight drives, somewhere in these litters of I love you's I never said, in the creases of my month-old sheets and in the calls I never made, somewhere between the daybreak and quiet Sunday mornings, between the lamp posts in the streets, between tonight and the first night I knew you, between the sound of hello's, and the sound of things ending for good — somewhere out there, darling, is a place where we've never fallen out love.

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.

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.

I know a thing or two about couple stuff, darling, and neither of those fits in the space in your heart. The rest of the world basks in love and all its typical aesthetics, you know, the usual; holding hands while overcoming fears and jumping off buildings, and sitting at beach under the midnight sky, talking while meteors come to listen, and staying in small-town bookstores for hours and seeing metaphors from the steam coming off their favorite coffee brew.

But then, loving you isn't all about walking down a trail of roses under pretty sunset hues; it's not sharing the same wanderlust and flying to countryside Europe. Loving you is writing alternate endings to a tragic film, only to find it even more frustrating. Loving you is getting ****** in wormholes leading to chaotic, parallel realities. Loving you is crashing on brick walls, and dancing under the falling debris made to look like a summer rain. Loving you darling isn't like love at all.

But if you give me a chance, I'll kiss you in the subways and make poems out of it, as if the meeting of our lips creates milky ways and all other celestial bodies poets write about.

So let me love you, darling, despite all of this.

Let me love you, the way you deserve it.

Let me love you nonetheless

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

this is no place for songs; songs are for heroes
and the carpets and garlands are all floating lifelessly:
a striking resemblance
of the islands —
our islands —
disappearing one by one.

this is no place for songs;
instead, you will hear the sirens screaming —
haunting the walls of your home
and you shall never again watch
and they shall never again drown.

and in the shadows, they lurk.
in the depths, they await.

save your breath for prayers,
save your words for a scream.
from the phantom waves where you'll be drowning,
gods spare not a sight.

i cold write poems about
klimt’s the kiss, soiled and stained in your garage,
how we’re all a mess of basorexia and urgent fingers,
darling, take me in your hands, i’m not gonna fall apart
like dead chrysanthemum petals.


i could write poems about long nights and long drives,
how the road had seen all those **** promises,
love, we’ll never repeat my parent’s history of falling out of love.
and yet history does rewrite itself
in different words,
different phrases,
different roads yet all the same.

i could write poems about
how you resemble the moon —
exquisite, beguiling,
and i am icarus,
all wide-eyed, all moonstruck,
all aware of the risks.

but no, darling

because as it turns out, this poem is about
the kisses planted on wrong places
and our bed, it’s filled with petals soiled by the earth.

darling, this is about us,
zipping ourselves in my parent’s skin,
oh how they lead us back to blood and bones
we’re running away from.

this is about the moon’s deceptive silver shades
and icarus,
falling,
plummeting,
crashing once more to the ground.

this poem is a mess of words
about our downfall.
this poem is a mess of words about you, darling.
a mess of words about you —
a mess of words about you gone.

you should know better than sacking hopeless places,
it is no glorious feat:
white hands,
erecting flags in the wounds of a pagan soil;
i wish i could've returned to dust right then.
white hands,
caressing softly the marks left by your whip
on my skin — now, a blank sheet,
wide open for your kisses;
but by now, your tongue should've known that
papercuts wound all the same.

my chest had been a burial place
for the nights i couldn't name;
and tonight,
my heart wants to leave behind
the very tomb —
the very body you seized for yourself —
the very host to your planted flags
and romanesque cathedrals
and brothels,
and tonight will be the crusades
for all these captured, lovely ashes
and all these captured, lovely bones.

and into the wind i'll be scattered.
and into the wind i'll go.
and honey, you may think you have won the war

but this is the song waiting in the taverns
that women will sing for you back home.

and i love you like this:

in these freshly washed sheets,
with our limbs tangling,
with your breath on my skin where my shoulder meets my neck
under your gaze,
under what's left of the stars,
in the air, the scent of coffee, and apple crisps, and something that's just purely you,
in these cold, quiet hours before the daylight,
in the every silent ticking of the clock
with newfound honesty
with newfound softness
with each calming of my breath,
with each time it's taken away
with the high of knowing you're here and we're here.
and with the fear of that high,
with the sunrise so far away
with us just lying here in the stillness, in the dark
in the inadequacy of poetry — darling this is peak experience. this is perfect.

i mount my heart on a wall,
still and discolored
where my taxidermist hands had pressed.

it breathes life into dead walls:
a hanging irony made of
soft cyclamens
and the closed, white fist of a tormented girl.

i mount my teeth on a wooden wall,
write my letters,
pour salt on spaces where i used to stand;
may i not stand here
once again.

i mount my hands on a wooden wall;
they do not knock. i do not answer.

silent as a lamb — down to a pit,
i watch the sheer cliff of my back
from where i have jumped
and the sundry sorrows shrink
into black, blinking dots
like a hidden villain
exposed.
i fall over myself
like in a slow-moving dream —
lead-like it flows like the acheron river.
and here comes the ferryman.

Do storms ever feel lighter?

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.

sad poems look a little like you.

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?

More than anyone, I owe myself a constant stream of apologies because one isn't enough for my self-transgressions. I wrapped my wounds in crimson lace so as to disguise them as softness and still, my skin is a rusty can of worms to every clueless stranger. Still, it leaves an ugly scabbing, even flowers dare not to grow. I owe myself myself a stream of apologies, for chewing on daylight countless of times — biting down hard until my tongue bled and spit out a carcass of dusks. I have carried it, buried it beneath my spine, until my back has become a living headstone people carelessly drive by. I wish I too, could forgo this mourning, like the rest of the world. Still, I find myself waking up to apologies left on my doorstep. Maybe one day I'll mean them. And maybe one day, I'll take them and accept them all. For now, I'll let my mouth be an exit wound for this aching — though it's never small enough to leave. And I'm never small enough to leave.

Maybe one day, I won't have to. I hope one day, I won't have to.

Where do I start in letting you go?

It's not in the ruminations. All they'll long for are simpler, purer times, back when loving me was everything you ever knew — back when sighing your name didn't hurt. Now it's a whisper, settling on the ground long after the woodsmoke has stopped lingering. Now, it's just a memory settling deep in an open wound.

And love, where do I start in letting you go? My hands are still bruised from writing poems, when you already were handing me crumpled paper roses — all etched with endings I was afraid to write. The moment you kissed her lips, did you already let me go? Now here on my shoulder rests the weight — the mess of it all. Tell me, what do I do with these words, falling helplessly on my lap? What do I do with all this hurting? What do I do with all this love?

And where do I start in letting you go, when my shaking hands still refuse to confront your absence? When my throat still refuses to abandon all yearning — a wounded huntress that still screams for the moon. And I'd hoped it is easier to stop loving you after your skin had been tainted by her lips, ghosting gently — forming into the sweetest of smiles.

And I'd hoped it is easier to stop loving you after you had drowned August's promises against her hair when you'd deepen your kiss — after you had surrendered September's 4 a.m.s, November's love letters, December's midnight rains, January's stove-lit dances, February's moonlit walks, March's Irish teas and solitude, and April's quiet peace — all of it, spoiled, in the name of her kiss. Now all of it — in ruins, lying, waiting patiently for a can of worms, burrowing their way into everything I held dear.

Rome didn't burn down in a day. I wish I would. I wish we would; what's left in ruins won't ever hurt.

And so love,
where do I start in letting you go?




// "Tell me all the ways of letting you go."

i remember being drunk on
our rainy day kisses and the city streets,
the aimless drives and the stolen cigarettes,
gasoline and i love you's suspended in the air;
i remember wanting that day to last.

i remember all the poems i'd written,
my fingertips,
on your back
and all the caffeine we'd run high on,
shaking,
panting,
whilst making love.

back then, writing you poems didn't feel
like relapsing into self-destruction —
writing you poems didn't mean
that i had to break my own heart
just to keep our future whole.

but now, i am lost in a sea of poetry
all written after you;

darling, the last one you read —
the one before you left
wasn't even the last.

and now, i am caught in a thunderstorm
named after all your unsaid goodbyes.
and now,
you feel
like a pit of heartaches
i can sink into anytime.

and clearly, this isn't poetic anymore —
these are just words tied together
to poorly model our august sunsets.
and clearly, this isn't us anymore —
these are just bodies
buried in a pile of mismatched heartbeats.

and clearly, this isn't love anymore, darling.
this is just me, writing about what's left of it.