These fantasies always end with you staying. Here, my heart can afford to break itself, over and over for you. Here, I never had to let you go again. Here, my love for you always — always outweighs the heartbreak. My love, these fantasies — they always end with us staying.

I guess some things, I wish we had. Some things, I wish were ours. Some things, I wish were us.

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.

How much more breaking do I have to do until my heart numbs itself? I am sick of this routine — my chest sewing itself just to be ripped apart once more. I wish I can leave it be — an open wound for the flies. And yet, how many more wounds are there until there is no healing scar left to tear? I am sick of this routine. Tonight, I wish my heart would just tear itself into a handful of benumbed pieces. And tomorrow would stare at me — an aftermath of a storm. A heaving curiosity. A girl, lying in pieces and with no heart left to break.

oh, what would i not give for you to gut open the poems — gut them out of me. what softness would i not stain? which bones would i not break? i look at my outstretched limbs — look for the parts i wouldn't hurt, but their silence has always been ominous. foreboding. anticipating. like wary, unmoving leaves. like quiet crows. like haunted dusks.

i spin among formless silhouettes. what would i taint?

what would i not?

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.

My 11:11s were made for sleepless nights
playing back all these scenes
when your heartbeat still melted against my ears,
every sigh that lingered on my temple,
every touch that lingered on my skin
11:11s were made for asking
this dimmed wall sconces what it would be like
to feel your body close the spaces,
to feel it next to mine once more,
of what it would be like to kiss you in the dark,
with complete abandonment,
like a wolf howling its heart out
to the moon after a sunset that lasted forever

It was 11:11, and now, I know
I should’ve closed my eyes
and kissed you that drunken April night,
and melted in your arms when I still had the chance.
Now, I close them, without you around,
wrestling with these fixations
trying to convince myself
that one more recall of the memories would be the last;
one more make-believe,
one more fantasy wouldn't hurt.
One more,

and one more,
and one more,
I said,

and it was 11:12
and suddenly,

it did.

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.

to love all of you within the noiseless half of a sigh is a time-swept fever dream stirring in my fists — part firework smoke, part lavenders, part quiet, cautious limerence. how you enchant and unsettle me — i run high and aimless, and free fall in seconds. i am smitten. desperate. love-sick. wordless now, for all i care, darling — i'll leave all of my poems strewn in your bed, like a girl shedding her mortality before a goddess in her truest form.


to disrupt this is a human blunder. to bask in it, divine. ♡

is there a way out of here other than the sudden violence of tearing through my skin? if i  find an escape route one day, i swear to god, i would leave even the calmest sunsets behind.

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.

so you sew your melancholy shut –
pour your father’s ***
on the stitches
like you always do

i turn my back and bend over –
ache descending my backbone
where your kisses used to rest;
it recoils in instinct

as i keep on digging for the same mistakes
on skinfolds and chromatic bruises
and thin walls where i hung
my tendency to ache
scrubbed out of me like dead skin,
as i lie, washed, stripped, and tender
in these soft, celestine sheets;
i pepper bits and pieces of myself
to diffuse the hurting

but my pain is blinded;
yours, all-seeing
as i draw my three of swords
from my deepest deck of cards
but there’s already an epigraph
of your name on my clavicles
and you see how your all-elysian, moon-drenched lover
is all tainted, all this time,
and darling, how alive you felt
when you fell in love with this disaster
but the truth is staying in love
will always be your death.

and what i know to be deathless love
is now lost in our ghastly lights
and how we danced with liquid fire
long enough to feel it burn
but all roads lead to rome, darling –
all roads lead to ruin
and all the letters i wrote you are banners
burning in its cathedrals
as roman gods watched us
pick our limbs apart.

and do you think
we can love each other through this,
touch our way out,
love our way out of these

wars we waged —
burning houses,
mess we made
kisses dead in our stately wake
this love — this feeling
spilling like ether, leaving
squandered poems
all over the place.
had you known it all along
had you walked away?

but darling how alive you felt —
how alive we felt in love
but  one day you’ll call it crucifixion
and i’ll call it back  my death.

and we fall like sacred dust,
a bedlam of debris.
and i draw my three of swords:
dead-cold steel
and paper-soft sorrows.


do you think we have it in us to love each other out of this?

some things, too soft for my careless hands — nectarine kisses and sunlit skin. the quiet highs of being held, like dahlias dying after a month. vervain wrists dipped in a borrowed prose. your heart — and mine; my love, some things, too soft to not break in my hands.

Maybe it's all still here, like storms made of bruises and the relics of Carthage under siege. Here, like the laments of a Sunday morning while staring back at tragic eyes. Maybe it's all here, somewhere in this layer of skin beneath the white lines on your wrists. Now the blade just feels like another stranger coming home at 4 a.m.

It was right here in the bones of a girl that once was made of sunlit blunders and curiosities; if you dig deep enough, you might exhume the remains of what she used to be — all purple vervains and the poems she swallowed whole.

Oh, that cruel, cruel joke of delicate things, still withering at the wake of storms such as yourself. Has no one cared enough to tell you that maybe, this isn't what getting better looks like? Maybe you just learned how to seem less messed up.

these days, emptiness is beginning to look more like a poem that writes itself. the irony is it is everything i can't be and everything i am

the quiet thinly films over these sheets;
i press my cheek on the pillow — soundless, it hears me.
i rest my dusk-dimmed mourning on quiescent tiles,
and the crickets cannot stand the
silence — it recognizes now the thoughts,
much better than poems can.

i have taken this wordless fall,
hands tied behind my back,
feet tied, tongue-tied
down these sweet, senseless,
daffodil deliriums

i have taken this wordless fall
away, unseen, i land in grace —
this is the last noise i will ever make.

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

i can never love you the way i claim — delicately and without violence. i remember hating flowers and broken seashells, and my grandmother, hand-sewing pastel dresses. deep down, my bones are raised on stories of ancient wars and biblical battles carried from memory to memory, a string of generational blunders — i am made of my father's bitterness and my mother's denial. so i will love you with corruptions and apologies, with bled-out  veins, giving in like an emptied river, with all the poems i have read and forgotten, and with everything that makes me finitely human.

Do storms ever feel lighter?

i can still feel it — the ghostly echo of storm clouds it in my throat, now dry and emptied of the softest sighs. they all had fallen on my flower-bed skin, pristine as the petals that once were. or so i pretend. i can still feel it in my throat: the storm, looming. the calm drowning itself, and its haunting, beckoning call to which my feet slowly walk.

some days, it's just you and the uncharted depths of your own skin.

some days, you can bother with poems — some days, you can only drown.

the world ends: it looks like an empty bed,
sheets running under your body the night before,
a faux lace dress caught in aventurine nails —
it fits like a memory, clings like an emptiness worn well.

together, we turned our backs on the saints,
but i pray to them like i haven't
forgotten a word; surely,
a plea is bound to keep you here
just long enough for me to forget:

the world ends: it looks like the corner table
where i last saw you; i pocket
my dizzying daydreams from across the street
and walk past a wormhole.

the world ends: it looks like wounded lips — pink daffodils
drunk on the slight touch of our fingers;
nothing heals from this.
new lovers will zip my skin open so carefully, with their
untainted hands
and find you buried; i never loved you
is all i say.

the world ends: it looks like a forgotten year
and some souls are always the first ones to leave
but i empty my veins, dredge up relics of your presence —
it still leaves me
disconcerted, breathless;
i pour my love in a letter, in paper flowers
and my tainted hands still find you buried:
a secret i can never keep
so i let you go
is all i say.

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.

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

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.

Love, I said I wouldn't miss the sound of your early morning voice.
These sheets were weighed from all the times the dawn sent its sunrays
like palms filled with love letters;
but maybe I too, had become all the dawns that lingered too long.
I said I wouldn't miss the outline of your body;
oh how I planted kisses on every uncharted curve
but this bed is now a map of strangers from all these towns I do not know.

I said I wouldn't miss the hands, touching,
fingers picking each stray breath away;
I wouldn’t miss waking up next to you —
all serene, all magical than lucid dreams.

But darling, it's ten to twelve and our memories,
they covet me as the summer rain pours outside
and now,

I miss all these stupid little things;
the brief way you wince at papercuts,
the secret smiles after eye rolls
and radios turned to the max,
the way red lipsticks and love notes
linger on bathroom mirrors;
the water and steam have erased them now,
love, I miss the way you hog blankets;
the threads have now come undone,
taking down your scent with them,
all too painful, all too slow, it slips
even from these memories,

And I know I said I wouldn't miss you
but it's half past twelve, and I'm in your shirt
and the rain had stopped
but I think so far — so far love,

missing you has not.

slice my tongue until the pieces resemble flower petals — until poems tremble on my very lips. on summer afternoons, they will look like the dried amaranths on your bedside table — in a city apartment you left. slice my tongue until the pieces resemble smoky quartz. it will sit quietly — each side showing the wild and quiet ways of aching. slice my tongue until it heals its wounds — until the sunset casts what's left of its light, and maybe my state of decay will finally look beautiful.

today, i will wake up and think of you. the first thing will be about how your eyes had the color of all the storms that left this year. next will be your hair, in flaming red, as if to make up for all the colors your heart has been drained of for loving me. then, i will think of the way i wrote you poems amid writer’s block; every line, a compulsion, an obsession of i love you's rephrased. i will think of the feel of your skin, cold, but burning, like mercury fires crashing to the poles.

then, i will remember the chipped nails and back scratches and the heat of the whiskey, rushing from your mouth to mine. i will remember october and her rooftop letters we sealed with the skyline's silhouette. i will remember how they have become a foliage of words i refused to stop writing — and words you refused to read. i will remember how we wished to be paper cranes flung to the sun, how i have become icarus incarnate, falling, and crashing back to the earth. today, i will wake up and remember how loving you became my flight and my downfall. i will let the pain eat me up, rip my lungs, one flashback at a time. i will let the pain break me and break me and break me until there's nothing left to break.

and then one day, i will wake up darling, without sleeping next to make-believe alternate endings, without addressing you in apostrophes, and without the storms tailored to be metaphors for you. one day, i will wake up without wondering if you were ever hurt the way i was. i will wake up without thinking of you. i will wake up without the slightest traces of pain.

and then i will let you go.

Eyes. Heartbreak is her sunlit memory barely held by a wooden clothespin. It hangs and glares before your eyes, mocking as it fades into an empty filmstrip. Heartbreak is a lost soul left to perish in her ghost-town, and warmer sunsets are lifetimes away. A wonderwall left standing, pinned polaroids, desperate scratches. You had fought hard and long, for this, but homes are made for breaking and crumbling and leaving, especially in the losing side.

Mouth. Heartbreak is a paper-tag of a goodbye caught in her lips. It is a metaphor that melts at the soft space under your tongue, a certain bittersweet taste made for drowning with a cold lager, a stranger’s whispers, and the perils of his unfiltered cigarette kiss. Heartbreak is taming a manic scream into a delicate, defeated sigh, out of sync with the way she breathed. But then sighing still hurts, and breathing still hurts because you’re alive – you’re so ******* alive for this unbuffered pain.

Chest. Heartbreak is begging your chest not to break amid a listzomaniac rush. Heartbreak is a prosaic throbbing, a treacherous ***** stuck in your ribs, begging to be held like it doesn’t hurt. Heartbreak is a site of buried lavender lithiums, asking for a eulogy; but silence is equally as oppressive. It is your body betraying you, like a city undone by its smokes. It is a quiet word – not a poem, because poems are beautiful despite the pain, and this isn’t. This isn’t.

Hands. Heartbreak is your shaky hand flipping through the last three pages of a tragedy — a heroine dies, a stray star falls, a maiden leaves on a horse-drawn carriage. There is no changing of the ending. Heartbreak is reaching for the empty space in bed, leaving your fingers in technicolored bruises. How can emptiness break one’s bones? Heartbreak is scrubbing your skin dry, raw, and untouchable where she once laid her kisses. Heartbreak is your nails digging through her letters in utter despair — for invisible ink, a promise in the postscript, an estranged lover in familiar flesh, only to find torn sheets, spilled wine, and finality.

Legs. Heartbreak is coming home to ***** laundry all over these cold, wistful floors. Heartbreak is walking in hushed tiptoes only to trip and fall down a memory lane – a kaleidoscope of all the wounds that can possibly hurt. It is catching an empty train to somewhere unloving her is possible – doable. Heartbreak is teaching your legs to run away from the chaos of her naked skin, and not to fall at her feet. But still, you fall and you fall and you break what’s left of your bones chasing after something that’s already gone – long before it has said goodbye. So turn your back and hold your heart — it breaks harder, louder, and worse before it settles down and sits as quiet aching: a forgotten filmstrip, a soundless breath, a calm poem, a serene night.

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