We always dreamed of
boarding that plane
and running away
to some old countryside in Europe
and you’d sell your poetry
to printing presses and
I’d play my songs
in shopping streets,

and boy, were we clueless
that a year later,
you’ll be running your fingers
down his spine to his tailbone,
as if they are the spaces
between the horizontal lines of your paper,

and I’ll be running high
on caffeine and regrets
and playing new songs about you —

new songs

you’ll never hear.

this poem is a lovechild
of my weary skin
and the sensual creeping of an all-consuming melancholia;

my voice, hoarse
from calling for the gods
whose names all fall away
at the sight of my undoing —
besides, who falls apart
at ungodly hours
but sinners?

why hast thou forsaken me —
there no longer is a need for this
when they had all forgotten your name
hours before the daybreak.

and yet everyday, i still wake,
waiting for this bed to collapse
under the weight of my hollow bones, holding
the weight of the frailest chaos
to ever befall these sorry sheets —
i thirst,
for a new kind of skin, unstained,
untouched —
wide enough
to hold all this weight of sadness
lying in these sorry sheets.

i've wanted too many epitaphs for a girl who's still alive;
today it's started wanting me back.

now, i tire,
wrap the cloth around my skin:
all ashen, all stench,
all cold, all dead.

now take this poem.
take this lovechild in your arms —
all brown eyes and little hands;
half melancholia;
barely a girl.

now take this body;
take its peace.
bury it in a pauper's field.

and what you need
to realize
is that
the flowers growing
on the tips
of someone else's pen
is not
the wilting of yours.

but what is forever, if not days just numbered too slow? then, love, we have spent forevers with a couple of sighs and a cigarette away from breaking under the moon — such a devastatingly beautiful sight. then, love, we have spent forevers with cherry-red lips against the thinnest parts of the skin, like dahlias pressed to the pages of a coffee-stained book. then, love, we have spent forevers naming skyscrapers and dying lights — calling them magic, calling them ours. then, love, we have spent forevers crafting words out of our pulses, leaving unintelligible whispers in the wake.

this no storm; this is the calm's betrayal.

and yet, i will hold you the way december holds onto her nights made of hours slipping too slow. i will recite to you all my unwritten postcripts until we have a word for emptiness, so searing — for forevers that end too soon. i will kiss you for the last time, even when these kisses are but the final blunders. i will slowly strip all this remaining love — i have nowhere to leave it in but here — in the space between these words. and i will depart amid the night's silence, leaving behind a briefcase of poems and dahlias bent at the stem, knowing that we have spent forevers against each other's skin, on each other's lips, in each other's arms.

but then, love, what is forever, if not days just numbered too slow?

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.

metaphors can't fit
in the distance
between your freckles
and petals made of words
blooming from your lips
don't look like
aphrodite,
born from the seafoam.

your eyes look nowhere
like a map of constellations
sprinkled with
my favorite phrases;
they're not even the color
of my favorite coffee,
or the ink I use
when making my blotched poems.

similes,
paradoxes,
they don't even
run in your veins
or arteries.

and yet curiously,
seeing you still feels
like reading poetry.

nothing good happens after 2 am.

and yet here we are —
a rather curious pair of star-litten messed ups;
they say that liquid mercury and bare skin
are never a good combination
but kiss me nonetheless;
hold me nonetheless,
burn me nonetheless —

after all,
temples get burned down for the idols they host.

nothing good happens after 2 am,
but then again,
this is no place for sunsets and poems and sunday dates;
this is the apocalypse —
trapped for centuries inside our skin.
so go on,
break me — crack me open and lick the wounds,
and then maybe we'll know why persephone keeps going back to the underworld.
and then maybe we can call it love.
so go on,
kiss me until running breathless
becomes our way of breathing;
this may not be something we survive.

after all,
the daylight is an estranged lover and we are this house's walls trying to forget.

nothing good happens after 2 am,
but you will be the reason for every word, darling.
you will be the nightfall-colored eyes,
the nails all painted black
from when you dug for the dirt in my chest.
you will be the forgotten histories,
the impenetrable groves,
the coffee shop clichés,
the storms that never pass,
the nights that never last,
the secret places and warzones
and cotton dresses and fallen peonies,
and a threefold heartbreak
personified —

after all,
heartbreaks feel better when they come from you.

nothing good happens after 2 am
but t h i s already is a cautionary tale, anyway,
even without the 2 am
and tonight will be us,
crying wolf and coming undone.
tonight will be us,
tiptoeing through a minefield of mistakes,
mistakes,
and mistakes.
tell me, what's the harm in another one?

tonight will be our mayhem
and our foreboding
and our free-fall —
fatal. irreversible. majestic.
tonight will be us —
foreign lands mapping each other,
baptizing each other, darling.

and tomorrow will be ours to regret.

i wanna dive head first
into a map of the night skies
trapped inside our four-walled room;
maybe this is where black holes go to die
and they can all stare back at me —
swallowing a chaos of sobs
and a chaos of all your favorite songs;
regardless, i’ll dive into the night skies,
or what it used to be
and name these stars – the ones that remain anyway,
after you.
after me.
after us;
at least they take a long time to die –
long enough for flowers to droop and fall apart
on weeds and lonely epitaphs.

and dear, i hope heaven is holding you closer than i could ever had;
tell me, did you, like sylvia
write suicide notes and call them poetry?

and god do i hope that heaven is holding you so close,
you forget all of the world’s sadness
you once took for your own.

out here, the calendula falls and
my eyes mourn over petal-covered graves
poems cannot hope to beautify.

But all cliché kinda sad poets have it —
a storm of poems
for someone who left.

And darling,
all of my storms
are named after you.

i have sealed all the papercuts on my skin;
they have become unmarked,
untended graves
and the willows have long learned
to do their weeping in the dark;
and now,
there can never be enough tears,
never enough mourners
dressed in all the shades of black
to share all this grief
in its most abstract form.

oh, to hear the farewells,
to feel the poems,
to see the wreaths
tossed all over the place
and yet, there can never be enough flowers in the world
to hide these wrists —
all scars and lines for everyone to see
and everyone to read
as if epitaphs to a gravestone;

these wrists —
all scratches from a girl buried by mistake;
the casket, the ground
can only do so much.

oh, such
morbid
thoughts
from such
a morbid
girl;

little one,
you write way too much about death
and his earthly belongings.


maybe one day he'll do the same.

Her eyes resemble
a fading filmstrip
left in the bottom drawer of our wardrobe
next to a lilac dress I’ve outgrown
and the rest of unrecognizable memories.

Her bones poke
like a yellow flower barrette on my scalp,
a sharp pencil on a tender wound,
a hand of a neglected child burying
anguish on the skin of another.

Her mouth has grown
poems too soft for my hands to hold;
i try to lie with them, a blister beneath her tongue
where your name now resides
and washes away
the sweet perils of a love like ours,

her chest, now its graveyard
that she no longer visits.
It has turned into a museum
of the things she’s built with you.

Limbs, hands, fingers —
All delicate things I wish I had — was
instead repel finality
in ways ugly,
in ways desperate,
in ways this poem can never soften.
But some things are made for ending,
Some bodies, for leaving,
Some hearts, for breaking
Some grief, for feeling in all the other places
and in all the other parts
where she once laid her kisses:
now just quiet, empty skin
aching, under the colder half
of October’s distant breath.


10/01
My anatomy still learns to forget
about the love it swore to remember.

I wear sadness a little too well,
it almost feels like second skin now –
uglier,
thicker,
more pronounced under the sun glare.
I wish I can undress myself.

Hera is sneering from afar.

I wish I can undress myself,
step out of this boundless skin
and its ironic inadequacy –
I am made of August’s tortured sighs;
I have worn them from my head down to my soles.
In vain, I have started scraping myself
against the softer sides of sunlight
but all I do is bruise and burn.

Hera looks down with pity –
somehow it's so much worse.


I wish I can undress myself.
I wish I can undress myself.

I wish I can undress myself
more than I already have.

oh, to be a
delicate thing
in these feral waves;

i remember steady grounds,
veneered floors,
greek columns —
my hand pressed softly
in the small of your back;
fingers —
aching
for the slightest of touch,
i remember sunlight;
our hearts were
lighter back then.
oh how we were
the envy
of chaotic things
and lonely gods.

now,
look at this war
i'd waged for you
as termites
eat away
at those
sunlit memories;


what's the point of fighting
when the sea already
has swallowed
and spat poems
written from the
losing side
of this war:
a mess
of what used to be
a delicate love;
now,
i'll fit
all of these
heartbreaks
in a letter if i could —
leave it on your shore.


and i
loved you
so;
i remember you
loving me back, helen;
i remember
sunlight
and
happier times.


now this love
is a wreck
of a battleship,
sinking,
drowning
in the weight
of these sighs.

now this love
are embers
dressed
in all
the muted shades of blue.

now this love
is not delicate —

it's just
breakable.

it's just
broken.

and oh how we were
the envy
of chaotic things
and lonely gods.

so many strangers,
falling in love
with all the words
i’d written
for someone who has
already fallen
out of love with me;

honey, i wish
you’re a stranger

again.

My mother’s white, quiet patience sways,
tantalizing before me like a well-lit crystal chandelier in my grandmother’s house.
I never take a bite of it,
an ever so-careful child, my grandmother used to fondly describe me,
a picky eater;
I never grew bigger than I used to be — still so small and scrawny,
a shivering child left crying in our bahay kubo, awaiting my mother’s return.
She comes home and laughs at my innocent anxiety.

It is a promised heirloom, it seems,
my mother’s white, quiet patience — well-kept in my late grandmother’s bedroom
where my father can never find
for his hands to choke and tear like an old 90s letter —
I was in her womb and he was in Egypt
down with the mummified pharaohs; she sent him poems
and I got a tiny glass pyramid, a snow of gold dust
I spun it — turned it upside down
until it broke, bathing me golden like a tiny sun.
I hid in my late aunt’s room, next to my mother’s mute patience,
it spills like milk, drenches like tears, blinds like a ray of light.

I can never inherit my mother’s patience but I wear her skin now;
twenty years, I have grown bigger, taller
and her sorrows and regrets fit me well like a brown, fur coat,
a pocket full of resentment, of repressed aching, of fingers numb from writing poems;
my mother was a poet, I know this now;
my father — an ordinary man,
his chest is a hollow chamber in a pyramid far, far away in Giza.
Sometimes, I think he’s still there, lying next to pharaohs
for all of perpetuity.
Sometimes, I think I have inherited his mystery
his tendency to perplex the eye, like a pyramid of secrets and secrets,
the archaeologists have given up after unearthing empty chambers after empty chambers,
Maybe there is nothing here to see
but dead, young, unloving bones
next to earthworms burrowing on my mother’s poems.

I can never inherit my mother’s patience; sometimes I think
she has left her aching somewhere in our bahay kubo,
in my dollhouse, perhaps, and I have picked it up
like a spiral seashell,
like Barbie’s tiny suitcase looking pretty in glitter,
swallowed in a single gulp, it’s still here inside me,
growing and poking and tearing and disfiguring,
I refuse to spit it out.
How do I carry it when she herself has not?
I scratch my limbs at the injustice.

My mother’s white, quiet patience sits in Lola Glo’s room,
like a ghost that never haunts but I wish it did —
sometimes, I still wait for damning screams, for broken windows,
for love poems burning in hell for its sins,
taking me down with them.
Sometimes, I still wait for her to leave
like a Macedonian queen fleeing Egypt and never coming back.

Then, I would have nothing to carry, nothing to wear,
nothing to ache for at starless nights —
no poems to open and seal like a stone entrance to a pharaoh’s chamber.
My mother’s white, quiet patience is an unlit crystal chandelier,
a few feet on top of my head. I laugh and spin like a tornado,
like a mad girl, swinging and raising my arms like I was five —
I hit and shatter everything in sight
then blame it on the fairies.
I eat the fine, hand-cut, polished crystals, I bleed poison on my tongue,
and my mother is Cleopatra nowhere to be found.

Everything is an accident, even my intentional carelessness,
now paper-white and porcelain-clean.
Everything is forgiven, even my father’s loud, beer-laced cruelty,
even my hands, closed in a fist.
My mother’s smile was bright and comforting,
but everything is an earthworm feeding on her poems.
And every poem is a poem till it rots

beneath a far-off, sun-swept Egypt.

August took it all away — the long peaceful drives before the daylight, the fresh sheets and coffee kisses and the scent of calm after the storm, the eyes — your eyes, deep brown in contrast of the afterglow.

August took it all away, so easily — all slender fingers and somber face — the comfort of the hearth, and the promises, and the sunlit, warm days of summer; how happy we were. Darling, how happy we were. Now the walls are oppressively dull behind vibrant photographs, and the room is cold, and the silence is loud. How could I have known that I was walking around the pitfalls elaborately built on your fragile skin? In all this obscurity, I only know that I loved you so. How could I have known all the impossibly cruel ways that you would break my heart, when all you did was loved me so?

And you loved me, right? You loved me, for some time, before all the wrong there is — before all the pitfalls gave in, spoiling midnights and tainting mornings, taking down everything that I ever called home. You loved me, darling; at least that you did. You loved me.



At least that you said.


Now August has taken it all away, and all I know is that heartbreaks are worse in the early hours of a cold morning.




I hope September is warmer. Brighter. Gentler.


I hope September is kinder to us.

I wish to flow, to pour,
to be seamless,
as the raven hair of a drowning woman;
it stays on the surface
but my head is beneath the water —
I am choking on my own cries.
I wish to be fluid and gentle as the sunlight
as it guts me open —
it looks immaculate with the knife
But I am the stones in a dead river,
the lump in my throat that doesn't quite fit
the size of my mouth;
I have swallowed too many suns
but the water floor still looks too dark,
I am a silhouette coughed up in the dawn,
the loch ness monster,
the still waters,
the body that goes nowhere but ashore.

I want to shed my skin,
pour it all and run dry —
be lighter than the sun.
I want to grab the god of time by his neck;
and out there,
Ophelia is still picking flowers,
humming to the fragments of sorrowful song,
her dress flows like a quiet brook;
it leaves only her sins in the water —
like a snakeskin in the Garden.
it leaves nothing but her sins —
they flow as she walks away.

Here,
in the middle of who I am

everything flows but me.

Choking is the last thing I remember.
The sun, the last thing I see.

if only icarus had fallen in love with the moon,
for the sea is her pining lover.

if only he had fallen in love with the moon this time,
then maybe,
the seafoam would have understood the heartbreak,
would have been kind enough to caress his dead body
onto the shore.

sweet one,
poems are for when you fall in love
with someone who just breaks your heart,
and this is
an elegy.

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.

the world we're in is made
for the silence between your words
now filled with goodbyes, un-lingering;
it is made for you,
breaking my heart in ways
poetry can never beautify.
it is made for the
goodnights never said
and your sneakers,
now missing from the shoe rack
and the last scents of your perfume
on the blanket you left behind.

but in a perfect world
beyond the black hole we're in,
your playlist is still my voice
saying i love yous in a loop.
in a perfect world,
the paper roses still bookmark
our favorite pages;
the side of your eyes still wrinkle
at the sound of my name;
we still live for the 5 am silence
mixed with regular coffee sips
and empty streets
and eye contacts
and that was our kind
of making love.

in a perfect world,
i still read you limericks
and you still annoy me
with your terrible puns
and we still tackle each other in bed
and it still leads to snuggling up,
and never to empty stares
and heartbeats that have
started beating backwards.

in a perfect world,
i'll never run out of metaphors
to write another poem for you,
the way you run out
of love for me.
in a perfect world,
you'll never slip out of my hands
the way my hair
has slipped out of yours.

in a perfect world,
i won't have to write this poem, darling

cause in a perfect world,
i never would have lost you.
in a perfect world,
you've never left at all.
your smile's still there when i wake up;
i'm still your cliche
"girl who feels like sunsets in a winter",
and i'm still
the one you love.

somewhere in manhattan,
atlas carries the weight of his heart —
a suitcase of battle scars and cigarettes
that strayed too far from his lips.

each vein, a thread
for all these sorry poems
that cannot write themselves.
each valve,
a compartment for spent lights
and all these fallen dandelion clocks —
all centuries' worth
and his body, it longs to rest
like a mass of dahlias and complexities,
coming undone in the arms
of a funeral song.



i remember someone telling me it's easier to talk about yourself in third person.


and yet, how do you depersonalize and say that
in there,
sadness has lovingly grown its flesh —
like wild grass spreading free in abandoned lawns,
albeit carefully contained,
carefully covered by these patches of skin
so as to not flood —
to not spill at every sigh
and yet, there can never be enough
breaths taken,
breaths given away

to keep it all intact,
to fend off all the
pecking,
the gnawing at the skin from its forgotten corners,
now a feast to a flight of vultures.

i now know why it's easier to talk about yourself in third person.


somewhere in manhattan,
atlas shakes, crumbles, collapses.
the flesh gives in;
the arms cave in under all this mass:
this weight of a heart,
this weight of the skies — they just slip right off your hands
and words don't see the difference.