his touch is boiling metal,
sweltering to delirium
that wherever his hands of red
take grazing, is swallowed
by the hell fire of his fingers

so once
he caught his lover
in his arms

so that the flames
frenzied upon all him
to hysteria
and incinerated
all
love
like wildfire.

Tonight, my lover told me
Love

Is not enough
For us

To get married.

On the claw of daybreak is a bridge, they say
     that extends to an everlasting sunrise foray,

     where every morning glory is at the cliff—
     whether they're climbing or descending is a riff—

     of muddied quagmires where a slew
     of sunflowers that on the talons of radiance either died or grew.

When love is the spine of the universe,
   you are its heart, and I its body.
  
I contain you
   in me.

But without you, my own,
   I shall not live nor shall the universe
   know about love,
   for there will not be your words
   that is the blood, slowing through my veins.

read my body like a bible,
let your tongue be the bookmark
that browses my pages,
and embeds between my spine
right where it shouldn't;
say my name like a prayer,
and i'll worship the shrine
under your stomach
like a god— my god!
let me lick the statuette

Watch how the white birds float
On fjords, eternally reposed—
The rustles will whisper
        how they keep pristine composure:
                 "Follow the glassy estuary streams,
                  where swans sleep quiescent darlings
                  of their ivory shrouds."

look back on the rubble
excavate every jagged shard
and splinter on my heart;
ache with me your
wounded finger
and find me in the hurt.

see you here.

gently pluck fragile shrapnel
from the heap of debris;
i am below here in the rubble
of a you and me.

yet do not be so gentle
with these fragile shrapnel
because even to bits
i am enamored;
crush the fractals between
your curious fingers,
pain me once more again
until the pieces are dust
that weathers to the wind,
let the breeze know
of my mourning.

and then maybe you
are needless now
to dig me from the sand
i am interred deep;
after all, i found comfort here,
and sound sleep.

but one thing to remember, love,
when you shovel me out my grave
look me in the eye, burier,
you are forgave.

see you again.

I want to be the cigarette
   between your lips,
   to when you would always decide
   whether to light me,
   take in my smoke,
   and let me singe scathingly your lungs,
   as you stare on my embers,
   entranced on my flicker,
   watching me dwindle
   with the haze growing
   more drunk of the evening dank;

Or keep me cold
   and suffer the grim hankering
   for my tepid nicotine
   to be your oxygen;
   for the comforting reek I leave on your collar;
   the bitter aftertaste, in your mouth.

And then rustle in sobs to the placid moon,
   "Let him **** me;
   He is all I want."

I die a death no one could resurrect me from
No dust could rot my body to dust
No grave stone could ever give me no honor
Nor flowers could perfume nor grass could embellish.

I die a death of all the dying and the decaying
Of all the woes of the living;
And when they excavate my bones of words
From my sepulcher of our forgotten histories
They'll only find two things:
Your words I etched on the underside of my nails,
   and your name chafed deep on the inside of my lips--
I will wail--
The soil of the Earth will first hear it,
Then the echoes would spiral up the roots of every tree
And they too will die of my misery,
That I have been dead yet dying still
Since the day you abandoned me lonely.

My own burial I visit
Days that come after that
Over and over and over and over ---
   and over and over and over

Dead and forever dying,
My heart and its yearning
   for our love--
Dead,
   and forever dying.

Your words of tender, mellow slur
are furls and wisps of thin, streaming clouds;
       dancing ecstatic,
       swaying hypnotic,
       sailing on the somber oceans of the wind--
then nestling as mist
   at the doors of these still lake lips of mine,
   hankering to swallow and wallow the low-resting, quiet, ambrosial fog.

I wake up in agony, somewhere today, where my hands fail to recognize the creases on your skin. It started abandoning the memory of what it's like to hold you. And as my fingers brush across your palms, its folds are some unfamiliar braille.

Then a streak of your scent pierces sheer through my conscious and reminds my heart. Suddenly, its beats are the rhythm that used to guide our feet to glide in synchrony in our waltz; it guides my steps, little by little, to when and where it all began: that once upon a yesterday, you held me close to your chest and made me listen to the orchestra of your breath-- until I awake and you're humming a different symphony.

It agonizes me, and my eyes that rummage for the love prints I impressed on your lips, that you hum it so merrily.

Lost souls wandering on the shores of love,
     looking over the shipwreck,
     wanting to cross the waters,
     not wanting to get their feet wet.
The ocean is too icy for their salty tears,
and their eyes of pond too warm for the sweet, inviting waves.

Lost souls wandering on the shores of love,
     dying for a sip to quench their arid hearts,
     wanting to drown,
     not wanting to dive.
The trenches too shallow for their collapsing lungs,
and their breaths too deep for such a shoal sea.

Lost souls wandering on the shores of love,
     wanting to get a taste of the crashing waters,
     choosing to eternal be walkers and gazers
     and lost and trapped on the coarse, sandy shores
     and chafe their soles;
     and remain unfound,
     meandering souls.

The worst way to lose somebody is to be, in his heart, ordinary; to be his luxury turned duty.

And the things he do, he does them to keep up with you, but not anymore to keep you.

This is when you'll know you've lost him. This is when it will hurt. But only until this you'll know you've loved deeply.

Your lips would blister with prayers for his return, but no poetry in the world could touch his soul and guide him back to your arms--

none unless the words are yours.*



P.S. *You'll only truly lose him when you start to think that maybe after all, you've never truly loved him. And that is also when you'll lose yourself-- to your own make-believe.

I tried to make the best pudding I could
     out of the crumbs of time you give me.

It tasted like half-baked smiles and salty tears.

Your breath is my nicotine,
your perfume, my smoke;
it warms my within--
a little nudge, a gentle poke

sends my sober mind ecstatic
and my drunken soul awake,
my thumping heart, erratic
and my rickety bones break

to the sound of your voice--
is my alcohol and wine
topples me out of poise,
stumbling never felt so fine

is your stare; i'm defenseless
as i stand before you
are my vice and addiction,
my downfall and destruction.

No matter how painful the words I write,
     or how perfectly beautiful they rhyme,
     no phrase, no line, no verse, no time
     or poetry in the world could bring you back.

And I'll miss you forever, like how the shore
     unspeakably misses the kisses of the tides
     as they recede;
     and like the corals on the ocean beds,
     you are all I need.

When a mourning heart wanders, it leaves footprints to follow--
           On faint-lit streets and murky gutters I was led all along;
I saw my body last night, hung with barbed wires on a bough.
And as I dangle, bathing in moonlight, I was singing our song.

I wish my love is your first breath
   of crisp, fresh air;
the first glimmer of sunlight,
   lining the horizons of dawn,
      as the lights of the Ferris wheel burn out;
your lips stained with nostalgia,
   kissed with the cherry tint of candy floss;
the smell of clean fabric against your skin--
   I wish I am--
      fragranced with the scent of popcorn--
after the carnival.

I choked on the crumpled paper
     where our love story we scribbled over.

This is how you know when love is true.

When your senses are numb and yet it pains you so much still, like your lungs are being wring out of blood; like your spine is a tower of stacked-up bones, collapsing; and your words fail and your every desperate action is scarce and all you feel inside well up on your eyes, condensed in an oceanic, salty drop. When you are no one but a void, deluging tears; until your lap is a swamp of one part sorrow and ninety-nine parts nostalgia.

I am he
   who blistered and
   purpled his aching
   fingers, upon playing
   the saddest, dissonant
   melodies out of
   his old, untuned
   guitar, whose strings
   of somber used-to-be's
   he ceaselessly strummed
   and plucked under
   the dullest starless
   night sky; and
   sing of his
   weeping heart the
   poetry of melancholy
   notes half-composed.

It is me--
   the lone guitarist
   on broken avenue
   who never stopped
   playing his love
   song of rue
   since you left--
   whose only lyrics
   is your name
   and your words
   he dearly kept.

You once told me,
"Good. Don't leave your lover. I'll get hurt."

And I promised I never would, for you are my.

But now it is I who say,
"Please. Come back to your lover. I am hurt."

"You know what makes every story pretty?" he asked.

"What?"

"Unpredictability. One day, I don't even know how your hands feel; the next, they are all I ever want to hold."

"You know what makes unpredictability pretty?"

"What?" he asked.

*"That your every syncopated heartbeat is my love story."

I felt my heart--
   it shriveled;
   my soul,
   it died
   at the thought
   that any time soon
   you might say,
   for good,
   *good night.

I woke up this day
   and searched for you by my bedside.

I didn't find you there.

I found you in my chest--
   beating.

When you feel like I'm starting to slip away, ask these unmade sheets how many times I've said I never want to see you go over eyes that flood tears. They'd tell you. Perhaps the warmth of my skin has lingered on its fibers. Wrap it around your body; feel my embrace.

When you feel like I'm getting cold, place your ears on these walls of white and eavesdrop to every remnant echo of burning, unsaid "I love you." They'd tell you. Find solace in the whispers of my love, in every heartbeat these walls would reverberate.

I wish you don't, but when you feel like I've never truly loved you, read every word I wrote to every inch of my red notebook. They'd tell you. I left my heart there... every single tiny crumb.

When I was younger, I wanted to be an astronaut. I told myself, "I want to see the stars and the planets up-close." I think probably we all had that stage in childhood where we all wished to be space walkers like Armstrong.

But eight years later, now I don't wish to be an astronaut anymore. I wish to be a writer. Because I have already seen all of the stars and the nebulae in your eyes. I wonder how they all got condensed in those two small circles like the moon. I whisper to myself, "It's so lustrous."

I already felt the weightlessness of space in your kisses, and your hugs are like oxygen tanks -- I need them to breathe. And when I see you-- just looking at your gait and smelling your perfume is even more enthralling than being in a launching rocket ship that pierces through the clouds and breaks the invisible mantle that separates the Earthly skies from the cosmic tapestry called "the rest of the universe". And I float away from reality and just revolve around the idea of you and nothing more like how the satellites of Jupiter revolve around it almost eternally.

I don't need to see the constellations anymore nor the planets or the meteors because I have seen them all in your skin-- I painted them on your skin. Others might call it bruises, but they do not understand that your body-- your neck, your arms, your chest are empty spaces and it'd feel like a sin not to embellish them with love marks -- the bruises that do not scream pain but* I love you's. *And I love you.

More than all the splendor of space, I still find your hair and the arch of your back and the gaps between your fingers and your clavicles so much more beautiful. Even this galaxy we live in seem to be unfit for its name: Milky Way. I think that name suits better your complexion alone. And when you smile-- oh, your smile! -- it is more radiant than the brightest comet and more warm than the hottest blue star; even the sun in the most arid summer-- it just gives me sunburns, but your smile, only yours, renders my heart melted.

When I was younger, I wanted to be an astronaut because I wanted to see the space. But now I don't anymore. Because I learned that astronauts are just spectators and I want to write about the universe. I want to write about you.

I promise you the next time I write,
   I would write your name in place with mine.

So that people would look for you and not me,
   and they would see, my love, the reason why I write.

As they gaze at your face, they would understand.
As they hear your voice, they would know
   that many a next time I would write,
   but only of one they are sowed;
   and even without you,
   I wouldn't for another.

I'd just retell our story. Your stories. How my heart has been taken. The joys. The frowns. Our very endeared moments. The tragedies.

I would retell it in a hudred different ways, but I don't think I could write for another because only you and your kisses give my pen its ink and my words the power.

I would retell it.

But I wish I never should.

I think about you. All the time. Every second of a minute, every minute of an hour, every hour of a day, every day of a month.

Even right now in utter silence, with just the purr of the fan and the clicking of keyboard keys as I type are heard, you are in my mind. You are in my mind, and I wish - if it's only possible - that you'd fall from my head, just as how you are in my vision - angelic - to my arms so I can embrace you, place my head on your chest, and just drown all other noise as I eavesdrop to the thumps of your heart.

But I looked at my arms and what I saw is my pillow. My favorite pillow. The one I talk to when I very much miss you. The one I cry to when all I wanted is for your shoulders to catch my tears. The one that put me to sleep many a night as the idea of you float in my head. I close my eyes and think of you. And in my dreams you are smiling. In my dreams you said you do miss me too. In my dreams you never let me go until I stopped crying. In my dreams I am sleeping soundly beside you with your breath as my lullaby.

Then I'd awake. Open my eyes. And think of you again, almost involuntarily. 'Cause I cannot stop, and I think I never will.

I love you.

*I really do.

I never thought it's possible, to have such
       deep fondness for somebody that you
       cannot spell the word 'love' without her
       name; that the word 'love' has become her.

I have a sweet tooth
   for chocolate
   chip cookies
   tonight.

And you told me--
   you have not
   even a
   bite.

But I say,
   darling,
   your lips
   are just as right.

The golden burn of dusk
   kisses my window panes and walls;
On table tops it rests,
   the moon and stars it calls.

Far above the horizon,
   the honey sun waves good-bye
With sighs of blues and purples,
   its glory's end is nigh.

The birds sing their last songs
   atop the birches' bough
And the sunset leave us thinking,
   "What do we really know?"
In another world it is rising,
   but right here it hides from view,
burying its face, so when morrow comes
   we can marvel its glory anew.

To love is to invite tragedies in your soul, disclosing your heart vulnerable to every pain.

But if love is this beautiful, I think I would smile to even the worst tragedies and say, "Welcome! If you are love, though you bring pain, I wish you never go away."

My tears have made puddles, which then turned into oceans, until there's no more land. I didn't make a boat. I thought it would subside, but now I'm drowning in the rising tides.