I wish you told me that wounding my knees was a part of the joy and that my hair already looked perfect in waves, and that bedtime stories weren't lame. I wish you told me these when I was a kid, instead of giving me the cliche ******* — those spilled stories over spilled beers about how you were forced to marry Mom instead of that girl named Beth.

We were caught in a story, the one with that school money thoughtlessly flung on the floor, road trips arguments and drunk-driving over eighty, and nonexistent goodnight kisses and hugs. As a kid, I believed those were the indicators of affection and love. But they're not and had I known that earlier, I wouldn't have stayed with someone who walked all over my mental health
with someone who took me on a desk and spit knives in his drunken slurs,
with someone who dialed another girl's number while thinking I was asleep,
with someone who only dialed my number while he thought his girl was asleep,
with someone who faded in the curtains after he saw my razored wrists,
with someone who said I was his ***** and called it his idea of love.
Had I known it earlier, I wouldn't have trusted men who hurt me just as you had. Had I known it earlier, I wouldn't have stayed with someone who had a ****** up notion of what love was. Had I known it earlier, I wouldn't have stayed with someone who was exactly like you.

Dad, had I known earlier that abuse wasn't supposed to be confused with love, I would have stayed alone.

midnights still find me retracing the moments
that led to our thousand lakeside kisses;
they were secrets left in a summer dream.
each second — a bowline knot
leading straight to our
late night drives
and vehicle breakdowns
and last minute goodbyes
at the break of dawn.

midnights still find me sleeping
next to a shoebox of the books you left;
i still hear your voice
when i read the lines
of your favorite paragraphs
the clock hands, mocking,
leading me through a maze of
memories and parking lot conversations.

midnights still find me rewriting histories
with resin-pressed flowers,
maybe the petals will point to where
i started losing you —
and maybe it's in every direction.
the black, bold numbers have become my crumbs
leading to road trips and
to all the bus stops we missed,
kissing;
now i still miss my stop
without your lips next to mine.

and midnights still find me
writing poems like these
but clearly,
you're too far off
for these words to reach.

and now, midnights still find me wanting you back.
and 'til now, midnights still find you gone.

My heart is a shrivel of miagos bushes,
uprooted, shoved, chucked in new soil;
the leaves between my lips,
now, in an unhealthy shade of chartreuse.

Regardless, I have taught myself
to shear them into tiny leaf crumbs,
making trails —
marking the houses, the buildings,
the roads of this foreign city,
safekeeping directions
into a catalog of things that aren't home.

My feet are weary and somehow,
they manage to find their way
back in this cold, oppressive room.
And yet, how does one sleep under the glare of these walls?
How does one revive a dying garden
in a city that only knows
the language of tires as they kiss the pavements,
in a city that only knows
the walis tingting's weary sweeping
of these crumbs of miagos leaves —
the ones leading back home?

Yes,

I can teach my tongue and all its browning, dying leaves
to remember these new ways of growth,
these new words, new schedules,
new routes, new streets.

Alas, even the waters, even the sun
can't teach it to love the language it doesn't speak.

too bright —
too light —
the hospital walls
offer no place to cry.
too flawless —
too white,
and i am the spot in the middle,
the blemish,
the stains,
the discoloration
to a scrutinizing gaze.

i can feel them shying away
from these black candles i lit —
burning away like a sacrifice —
the melting filth of wax
that dared defile
something so holy as a savior's robes,

i can feel them flinch
upon the touch of these hands
and yet i am a woman unhealed,

upon the sight of these tears —
a baptism,
a renaming ceremony

in honor of the graveyards
i dug in secret,
in honor of the coffins
lowered in my chest,
in honor of the soil filling in the depths
all too careful,
all too slow
until i am reborn as Mourning
and until mourning fades into specks of dust.

and the hospital walls still look spotless.
and the hospital walls still look too pure.

𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑦𝑠 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑑𝑢𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑝𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠. 𝑚𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑠 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑖𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑’𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛.

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.

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.

to this, i resign
and i will lie motionless,
as november nights lovingly peel my skin.

strip me down,
i am sick of feeling callouses.
i am sick of my sheets
licking all these wounds clean.
i am sick of waiting for tenderness
to grow from my open sores
so strip me down —
this is as loving as it can get.
to this, i resign —
to the mercy of lonely, november nights.

so hold me down,
a pillow on my face —
petunias in my throat:

this is as soft as i can be.

peel me open. peel me raw,
and beneath it all, perhaps, i'll stumble
on something that finally
looks like home.

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.

And with her,
it’s not just
making love.
It’s making
poetry.

"These are but bruises not healing fast enough — bruises from all the black holes I swallowed. Then again, the ocean doesn't always spit back out what it has claimed for itself. Maybe it works that way as well, with all these black holes. Because, you see, if I'm not one at all, why does daylight breaking through my skin have to hurt this much?"

Today,
I am the emptiest space
and in the center is a black hole.
The sun, dethroned;
the planets have seen it all

and they can only witness so much.

Then again,
what happens in space is unseen by the naked eye.

i carry around bones from a dug up grave. i hold onto the thorns of burial flowers. i trip on the words scattered from my own séance. pray tell, where do i lay these down to rest, if not inside me?

i seal them in the dark. i seal them shut.

the ghostly whisper of despair
lingers on ice-cold neck,
like lead, creeping,
like vines, crawling
like veins on quartz.

bash it. bash it.
bash it on my wrists.

lately, i try to write poetry but all that spills is violence;
i am a woman possessed. *******. all foul, sulfur scent.
this lace nightgown is weary from holding together
loose bones, loose skin, loose soul.

and the sunless sky has buried its dead,
all in bleeding, black mourning veil ensemble.
and i am gray — gray as a body drained of blood.

and with all these autumns i've spent bleeding, god,
have i not bled enough?

If dig on my skin
deep enough,
will it reveal a shallow grave?
Shallow —
but deep enough
for my wasting bones —
deep enough
for rotting flowers,
deep enough
for me to rest?

I.
This love was made for late-night drives and city lights, left hundreds of miles away. It was made for footsteps, softened by museum floors. It was made for crowded airports — your hand, still finding mine. It was made for sunset-lit kisses, as Intramuros crumbles in the background; the walls and I are both made of brittle bones and curiosities, falling away at your kiss and yet, I felt my purest — my softest whilst the free-fall.

Maybe I did love you more.

II.
Love, it was soft. It was good. It was home. And it was a lie.

And I loved you, I loved you, I loved you — finally with a kind that didn't hurt. And yet, I never knew how to miss you without wanting to rip my heart out.

Maybe I did love you more.

III.
"I wish I didn't hurt you."

"Me too."

And despite you saying it, maybe it was I who loved you more. I know my poems have been saying goodbye way too many times.

Maybe I did love you more.

IV.
But this love, it was made for endings. And I hope you comb through airport seats, looking for my face among strangers. I hope you see my name, fading with dying lights. And I hope you know I'll no longer allow myself to think of us. Tonight, poems won't be mourning you — it'll be mourning my wounds.

Your name is written all over them.

Tonight, your memory will feel the steady flow of my pulse. It'll feel each of my aching breath, in silence that once belonged to us. And tonight, your memory will hold me gently in its arms, for the last time. As if we weren't broken. As if we were still us. And I will slip away, one breath at a time — before the day breaks.

I hope your thoughts no longer haunt me come early, morning light.

And I know I say goodbye way too many times, darling — I say goodbye too many times.

Maybe I did love you more.

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.

the poets and their poems
say that
she is
an ocean,
vast enough — deep enough
to hold
all of the world's
sun-forsaken sadness,
to hold so much enigma
and twisted ironies
of how oceans — such as herself  —
d r o w n.


and here, we see
a search and rescue.

here we see
a body pulled out.

here we see
the poets.

here we see
the poems.

here we see
the liars.

here we see
the lies.

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.

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.

my sadness is a vagabond that cannot make up its mind. sometimes, it wanders to the farthest places and brings back a box of strange heartaches. other times, it begs to be felt, and i let it in — like an estranged lover coming back in sultry, august nights only to leave in the morning. and i become everything but me. sometimes, i can hear its breath, lingering in the sunless lines of poetry. other times, it kisses my most familiar scars. i yield, hoping for my skin to stop bruising so **** easily where gentle kisses fall. my sadness is a vagabond and i am yet to draw the blinds. i am yet to shut my windows and lock the door. one day, these ribs won't be prison bars — they will be for keeping out unwelcome, uncertain wanderers. they will be on my side of the battle.

and i will wake up, safe, without an estranged lover lingering on the doorstep — without its scent lingering on my skin.

i will wake up — me. me. me. grounded. not a tabernacle to be carried off. not a skin for sorrows to wear.

When did you start waiting for shooting stars to dance in the skies? When did you start bending down and let your wish fall upon a six-petal ixora? When did you start hoping for four-leaf clovers in the fields? When did you start whispering your secret dreams to yourself before blowing the birthday candles? When did you start tossing pennies on wishing wells? When did you start muttering you heart's desire on fallen eyelashes? When did you start staying up late to wait for 11:11 to come?

When did you start believing in the magic they bring?


When did you stop?