in bed, shrinking to the smallest space my skin and bones will allow. in bed, with my sorrows growing, sprawling out in every direction, all for the world to see.

how can i go and fade quietly when my hurting is a loud, lurid spectacle under flashy, purple lights?

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.

tell me, how long do heartbreaks last? it has been a long while now, darling and i should have gotten over you already, but here i am still mailing my heartaches to september, hoping that its rains take it all away. i should have gotten over you but still, i have learned to hide my love in the crumpled edges of every unsent letter. i have learned to tuck it in a box of overrated heartaches. i have learned to silence it, just as i have learned to silence all the songs i can never listen to again without breaking.

i should have gotten over you by now but my here i am — palms made of longing and rust, reaching out for empty couches and empty beds — a stubborn instinct, a muscle memory carved in my brain. and despite all the fumbling, all the reaching — all these spaces can offer are poems spilled by these telltale lips, like lilies crowding a grave of what we were and what had been. i should have gotten over you by now, but what's the harm in failing? after all, i have nothing more to lose but made-up metaphors and midnights.

so these are all my high-hopes free-falling once more to the ground. so this is me, straightening up the crumpled edges. this is me, tearing boxes and looking at heartache in the eye. this is me, drowning in the songs we ruined no matter how much it rips my heart. and this isn't another one of those unsent letters; this is an apostrophe i never dared to write seven years earlier, cause darling, some heartbreaks, you turn to poetry; some heartbreaks, you just don't. this is a testimony about what it's like to say 'i love you', and you can hear the hesitations from the tip of their tongue. this is a testimony about what it's like to have someone slipping and fading away amid all your denials. this is about what it's like to kiss someone and see someone, and the living with the pain of not knowing it's your last. this is about what it's like to wake up one day, and one month, and one year after they leave without the emptiness getting any lighter. this is about what it's like to lose someone — to just lose someone right before your very eyes. this is a testimony, darling, about what it's like to lose someone — to just helplessly lose someone when you still love them so much.

my father pours his beer on my mother’s wounds.

i bet she rues the moment
god fashioned her out of his hollow ribs
and him, out of the twigs breaking
under her careless, tiny feet when she was fourteen.

hollow and broken, the walls fall
all over me like ancient, perishing twin cities
and lot’s wife never looks back; the angels never look back —
i crack like a lightless dawn that wants to disappear
but my brother has started to look like me —
wearing an all too familiar silence, an all too familiar sadness
wrapped around his neck like a cursed talisman.
my sister’s wrists are exposed; i check
for bitterness, and cigarettes, and boys —
maybe i hid them better and held them tighter away
until i was pale and white as a ghost i longed to be,

hollow and broken, the walls fall; the door flings open.

i no longer have to hide my wrists,
but i crouch to a cluttered corner of my room.
every sudden movement, every unchanging voice,
and i bow my head low for my father to pour his beer,
like a baptism of the heathen who accepts the words of god.

my mother’s wounds shine like biblical relics
kept in my body — too fragile and small
but i was not made for the word of god
who calls himself by my father’s name.

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.

I have been waiting for that bus that will take me rides away, from this town drenched in all the depressing shades of blue. Maybe I can reach the point where I’ll look at the rearview mirror, and no longer feel sorry for my younger self and all the hurting she did alone. Maybe I can finally disentangle myself from all forms of sadness I slept with. Maybe I can take the trip with the longest ride and make it out of here.

But I’m still stuck in the same old station, along with other runaways. And it’s getting late. It’s getting late.

so here i am, walking away from cadillacs and city lights, as if skipping through soundtracks and photographs. above, the clouds have worn their black veils and the rain, it has started mourning each car i pass by, each block, each step taken. it mourns all the sorrows i cannot poke, all the letters i cannot write, all the words i cannot say.

the rain, it mourns all those summer days of pure bliss, with the sunlight peacefully fissuring through the trees. oh how we kissed, all soiled jeans and grass on sundresses. sweaty palms, hands on thighs, all yours prayers left on my neck. the cigarettes and dogwoods forgotten on our periphery.



i love you, i love you, i love you. you were the first, the last, the always.



and yet, how did we ever become that sweet summer’s downfall? the cigarettes are now ashed under all these spent lights and faint sunset colors. these mint breaths and sun-warmed kisses, now just bruises on my lips — now just memories slowly flaking off my skin.





and i used to love you. stupid, stupid girl.





now the rain has washed all those fields and the sins they’d seen. it has washed my skin of the lingering cigarette smoke, of your kisses, of your touch, and i’m not sure if i ever wanna forget. but even the rain’s heartbreak leaves behind the serenity of the last raindrops. lush grasses. damp streets. that distinct, morning breeze. that subtle scent of petrichor. that quiet settling of the calm.





maybe that’s all i need to know.

My words don't know peace. They are the nightshades all over a hunting ground. They are the bending of sunlight as it slices itself against headstones. They are a patchwork of all the cruel things I've done with my hands. They are the birds of prey, circling overhead a wounded doe. My words don't know peace — they are made of every last bit of my chaos, barely contained by my fingers. They are made of every last bit of my violence made to look nonthreatening. Gentle as the wind and tame as a field of roses — the thorns, left buried in your back.

Still, a refugee trembles, hides beneath her battle scars. She recognizes the wars waged in her skin — the cruel way they stay long after the last battle — the cruel way they don't know peace.

it's almost midnight and i'm drowning in every ******* poem i ever wrote for you — in every ******* poem you'll no longer read.

honey you never loved me, you simply loved having someone you could write poetry about.



and i gave you that.

the light, its every unsteady flicker
every unfolding beam — it's all just a farce;
at least over there,
in the shadows,
i cannot tell which areas of my skin
are cursed and befouled
and which remain untouched by the blade,
unscratched by my nails;
i cannot read the lines;
written whilst sad and lost,
drunk and sober.
all the wounds,
all the carcasses,
all the living and breathing parts,
all the hints of a vague gestalt —
now all fading,
now all unseen,
now all and entirely swallowed by the darkness.

and in the shadows, i have become finally whole.

I stick my fingers in my throat
and throw up a basket of swallowed suns;
under it, my tongue is parched and pinned in place
like a dried house moth on an entomologist’s hand
that nurses it back to life

and demands devotion in return,
a poem in return.

But I have purged the feeling being out of me
like a cold, cold man now averse to the ways of his younger lover
who is alive for all of it — the lust and the starving kisses
and the quiet deaths in the morning only to haunt at night.

I leave letters for my bitten nails without meaning a single word,
and go to lie with the superficiality, the hypocrisy nesting under my tongue.

I have started writing poems again — see where they take me this time
and find myself here, once more
where a fool unpacks her baggage and out I come rolling
like a dead body with a foaming mouth, a brown moth burning under the sun,
a leech that scurries under salt and needles,
slowly eroding like sanity.

She thinks, therefore, she is, they say,
but at what cost? She looks on and pens this poem
with a tiny smile on her lips.

there are nights when i’ll tire myself out chasing cars and city lights or writing about constellations i don’t even know, and there are nights like this, when i can’t help but steal our happy endings from the poems you haven’t read. there are nights like this, when your name dislodges me from the orbits i learned to tiptoe in just so i can forget what walking next to you feels like. there are nights like this, when i wish that our songs will wane with the moonlight.

there are nights like this, darling — when you’re asleep while i’m out here trying to unlearn the patterns of missing you — nights when i miss you even more than i want to.

there are nights like this, darling.

there are nights like tonight.

I want my love to remind you of the first stars you see during the nightfall, of the movie soundtracks you sing under the shower, of the words from a book you can’t put down, of the scenes you remember from a half-forgotten dream.

I want my love to remind of you the first sunrise we saw together from my bed, of the coffee blend that made you realize you loved coffee, and of riding buses during sunsets, and of the first flowers that came right from your soul.

I want my love to remind you that despite its harshness and sadness, there is something kind and soft and gentle in this world, darling — and that you can call it home.

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 tonight, we no longer walk under the dripping yellows of the moonlight —
for the moon, it comes in phases.

but who i am, and who you are, and who we love
do not.

and tonight, we are made of half-darkness and half-stars borrowed from the night skies
but tomorrow, the colors of the daytime
will wash away the relics of this night

and darling, we’ll come out like the sun.

we’ll come out like the sun.

"I guess we're all in varying degrees of 'not okay'."

i tire myself out. i bite on my heart and spit it out — press my fingers on the dents, the teeth marks, the parts that are supposed to hurt. and i watch as it breaks into a thousand glasses. dreams. futile daylights. i watch, ever so quietly. i watch, unfeeling.

so when you dissolve into a thousand poems you can never write trying to look for the way out, let go. even the moon melts parts of itself, and your skin, it is made from the cracks constellations have between its stars. and when december starts to breathe the last of its sadness — and how it lingers on your skin: a glass so breakable, let go; wilted flowers no longer flinch at a lightning's touch; you are made from the same matter — all cold lips and an ether of sighs. let go, darling. all this, because you are not just a girl. you are a storm without a calm.

darling, loving me is falling apart with octobers and kissing your poems goodbye. it is watching autumns unfold while slipping into the tracks of a freight train. i will kiss your skin, all chapped lips and sweetened cigarettes, my hands on your neck, as if feeling the walls of an athenian ruin. i will be every distinctive silhouette in a film, every line in a song, every secret spilling gracelessly off your lips before you catch yourself. i will set you on fire and you will burn; all wide-eyed and irises made of the storm, beneath my feather light touches.

i have a proclivity for breaking hearts and you will find yourself neck-deep in whirl of heartbreaks and headlights — all moonstruck and confused. i will break you — destroy you, bit by bit, in the most elaborate, exquisite way, that you will know one thing, darling —

chaos has a tendency to look beautiful.

how can i constantly forget something as innate, as natural as breathing — how do i stop holding it intimately and finally see self-transgression?

i am bone-tired and befogged with melancholia; i cannot wait to fall and bounce cheerlessly in a field of forlorn, arenaria flowers, all over the sunless forest floor. leave me be — a strange girl in a sleepy, run-down town. leave me be — a hopeless case in my own quiet apocalypse.

"there were black holes forming inside you, you see — all glorious, all millions of solar masses. so darling, maybe that was the time sighs started to become so heavy."

In all ways, I have lined up my scars and written them insincere apologies; each word — a mockery and a transgression carelessly thrown in the night. I have allowed dread to settle deeply between my collar bones: an arrow buried between antlers until it unsettles and chokes. I have sewn sadness into my skin, like a dainty, silk sundress; worn it to church and to the funeral mass of a little girl I had to ****. She'll never know how much I mourned her, how on some nights, I still do. In all ways, I have looked at my skin, my fingers, and calves, and tailbone and saw a body that's never known gentleness or summertime souls or the gentle falling of the rain.

So after all of that, how, then, can I hold my heart now, without ever breaking it?


Tell me — how long can I hold my heart without ever breaking it?

You’re everything bad for me; our idea of love is crashing into sunburnt, rust walls, with hands around each other’s neck. There we are, soaked in each other’s sadness. There we are, all cold, mechanical limbs until we can no longer tell whose hand does the breaking – whose skin is left with scars. There we are, silhouettes jumping off Ferris wheels straight into the fray – all broken bones and the maddest smile.

This is love – in its ugliest form.
You’re everything bad for me; you’re every terrible idea – every wrong decision made seconds before going haywire.

And yet, maybe, you’re not – maybe it’s me.

Maybe it’s me; I lived to come undone and fall apart to your autumn eyes. Maybe it’s me: cold, dilapidated skin after all the havocs you wreaked, and still, I would stand and run to you – despite all this knowing – all this hurting. So darling, break me – leave me in ruins, for another life to see.

I wasn’t good for myself anyway.

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.

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.

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.

You were my only chance at the calm, it's no secret. Not when my skin had become a topography of city light and anomalies waiting to happen. Not when broken wrists and collarbones had defined my name. And for years, my fingers had held onto rusting street signs, pointing to where my flesh had started to decay under the nipping of the butterflies — places to avoid touching, otherwise I'd break.

But you were the calm.

And for so long, it had evaded my side of the bed. And I know you had tasted dead dahlias and maladies off my tongue. Poets don't write about lips like mine — those that repel clarity and softness — those that had forgotten the words to a prayer. And it's no secret that I had spent years walking on a tilted axis and screaming at the pitfalls of my own doing. And yet you kissed me; for once, my skin had learned silence — raw, and in broad daylight. For once, I didn't have to be the storm that I was.

And love, whoever knew you would betray the calm, when you were my only chance at it?

Now, nightfalls just feel like bruises starting to show way too soon. Now, September nights are just cold and are filled with blunders. Now, this heartbreak seems like it may outlast all my well-kept sunsets, waiting for me at the end of this storm. And it could've been you, still — it could've been us. Now all that we were is a wreck to behold. And love, must all beautiful things rot?

You were the calm, but poets don't write about tragedies like these.

Maybe it's better off that way.

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.

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.

"Please don't ever leave me."

And love, I never would have left — not for all the serene mornings unsettled by these shapeless thoughts. Not for all the sanest kisses laid gracefully on scarring skin. Not for all the storms that had dissolved into the calm. I never would have left you — not for the world falling away into a mess of sorrows while the sun watches from afar. But the street lights are spent and mornings are colder and my hands are bruised from picking up all the pieces that you broke.

Did you feel most alive when you were killing me?


Now in the silence, my poems mourn over a loss that isn't theirs.


And in the silence, you say, "Please, don't ever leave me."



And in the silence, I answer, "I wish I never had to."

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.

writing you poems feels like relapsing into self-destruction