Nothing is real;
They scream damnation
Behind computer screens
Expecting attention
Drawing face
To the problem at hand
Flames break loose
In the arena pit where
Witty strikes and fat love
Douse the dodgy daggers of
Misunderstood hatred
While apathetic eyes
Watch the wretched souls
Bleed their fake hearts out
Screaming a battle cry
For the sake of emotion
Because in today's world,
Nothing is real;
They all think they feel
Driven by passion or God
Or self-righteousness
When the motive is really
Vanity at its finest.
No one has all of
Heaven to say
No one is a prophet
No one walks the keyboard
Without a leash
No one can use a beautiful
Thing to mask the ugly
No one makes the void
Any less empty
Because at the end of today's so-called reality,
Nothing is real.

It's a lesson for the self-proclaimed
Elite to learn—pride kills
All who use it to fly
And leave the atmosphere
Because the universe is a cold place
(Some might say a cursed place)
Where stars are prone to die
And incinerate you with their light,
With their truth.
Those who survive only live to die,
Drifting endlessly in lonely detachment
For scorning the parental grasp
Of god-given gravity; the Proud
Shall be exiled by their own ego
And hail to the reign of oblivion.

Regret washes over in oceans,
Drenching a hot head with
Unholy sorrow and disgust;
Time reigns over as Almighty Queen
Who casts a permanent chill over
The land, the mirrors, the soul.
The molten mistakes cool solid
In the prison of our brains—
Forever materialized, measured, weighted.
A prideful ego never dies—
It's only masked by alibis.

I've mistaken my mind for a jungle,
The wild imagination
Seizing every acre
In lush green forests,
My thoughts flowing fast
In white water jet streams
To cool a red unknown.
The animals who prance
Around make the noise
Of a million mysteries;
I hear every sound
Every vowel pronounced
And fall into a trance—

5:00 p.m., the day almost gone,
Two essays and a final;
My forests cease to dance.

Every second he is missing,
The wheels of my heart whine
With the ache and the longing
For his hand to hold mine.

Gone a man, beaten, and brave
I embodied his wine.
God dug him a grave—
I made it a shrine.

The way you hate me
Just tears me to ****** pieces.
She says they’re all lies, but I
Know it’s all very true—
True I shouldn’t have loved you
And your bubbling smile
And the way your touch goes
On for ten miles
And I wonder why I
Just sit here and cry
On my dampened bedside
Because you hate me inside.

These little children
Run through my head:
Nameless, naked
Bare to the bleached bones
Mouths agape
Hungering for meaning and
Eating it up like air
Screaming and clawing
In the dead of night
Pleading for light
And a home to stain—
So I fed them paper
And they left my brain.

I hear San Francisco loud and clear—
The trolleys chug by in childish gulps,
The steep hills catch the wind's yelps,
The cramped stores house a profound history.
The city cries tears of joy so subtly
That people throw gentle smiles to the earth—
A postcard has never wept into such reality.

Like the shutter of a metal screen,
The sun descends in a tessellation as
Brilliant as the city who silently sleeps
With its grand eyes wide open—
A father and mother at last.

I see dead bodies
Where libraries used to be

I take nothing seriously
Not even this poem
Or the literary value
I don't give a ****
(love me)

Traditional structure is a prison
And I am Andy Dufresne

My pen is a knife and
This paper is skin,
I cut myself open to feel
The poetry ooze like red art

Stardust settles around my livid woe
Hopelessly like divine snow

**(I bury myself in all my falseness—
A poet was never there.)

Imperfection will never do—
My eagle eyes understand all of you
And the indigestible fact that you could be
Better, beautiful, sacred, perfect—
My skies now rain your flaws, it's true.

But I have to accept my own faults too.

Everywhere
There is poison:
In the drunken ******
That purr at his heels,
In the boy-turned-badass
Smoking and drinking away innocence,
In the woman who's down to die
For any way up,
In the alpha male too friendly
To reveal the toxin within.

Every bone inside me breathes fire
(A gentle flame but barely tame),
My aching words singing volumes
Over the rooftops of a restless Berkeley,
My voice resounding like the great Campanile
Who shakes the world every hour,
And today (and everyday) I hold power
In the little poems I etch
Upon notebooks
              Across ears
                            Through hearts
                                         Against fears
Because anything is possible
When passion ignites action
And sets a whole mind into
Vicious conflagration—
The ashes will behold
Divine inspiration.

A slow-melting lump in my mouth
So sweet my teeth perspire,
(Coated succulent like sin)
The layer viscous like desire,
The crowns rotting from within.

Sometimes I feel so lonely my soul
Quivers, my entire being shakes and
Shivers until my plump heart becomes
Hollow like the last hopes I
Swallow in nervousness, praying, praying...
I've fully rejected that love will find me
Alive so I might as well die
Early so that Death will
Surely love me all the way to the
Grave.

Your sweet, silky words
Glaze my desperate lips:
A stream of smooth water
Wetting the roses in my eyes
Into blossoming like spring.

If hating the both of you is a sin,
I’m already in hell.
Been living in hell since the day
you came with Kit in your stomach
and me in the backs of your ***** Vietnamese minds.

First, you think gay people are
nasty, *****—wrong.
Second, you saw that Facebook photo of me
at the pride parade and now you think
that I’m gay,
that I’m nasty, *****, wrong.

And third, you showed him that picture
and now he doesn’t even want to call me his son.

I’m not sure of what I am, but I am sure of one thing—
that I don’t want to be your son if it means
living up to your standards, beliefs, misconceptions and predispositions
that are as ugly and low as the Communist oppression
you think you left behind.

                                                               ­      I only live up to America.

Toss my number on the stovetop and burn it—
Burn it like a ******.
Burn it like Chinese incense.
Burn it like your millionth cigarette bud.

**I’ll burn like the Fourth of July.

My culture betrayed me at birth,
Abandoned me on the West Coast
And stripped the heritage from my
Rosy red tongue
                                       the Cali sun
Kissing my ****** skin, carefully, softly,
Wrapping me in her white bed sheets
Calling me one of her own.

Too attached to
The memory of you
And your sunken dimples
That held up the happy curve of your lips
(And held up my world too),

The want in your voice
Coarse with loneliness and anguish,
Though evaporating when ******
Between us two
(My sweet words the answer to your sole prayer),

Your distant stare shielding
A wall of deep thoughts
Scared and shamed and lovingly true
(**** as the ocean blue)—
I love you.

Depression arrives suddenly at your door
Dressed in beautiful black linens
And a white shirt underneath,
Asking for your hand in a marriage so absolutely
Lovely you were dying to say yes, his
Words pooling over your broken frame,
Suspending you in his cold but comforting
Oceans that make you hunger for eternal
Sleep and decay until your Soul fades away
Into the shadowed inkling of a dream.

Some nights, my Blankie covers me up tight
And whispers filthy secrets to my bones:
“I’ll love you ‘til the warmth calms down your fright,
I’ll be here guarding you from dark Unknowns.”
He feeds me dreams that fill me up with hope—
So sweet like sin!—they never were to last.
By morning light I wake up, left to cope
With sandy eyes: the salt of good dreams passed.
But some nights—dark and dreary nights—when all
The world and stars are vexed under Selene,
He leaves (my ****** body bare)—His wall
Is never there to truly keep me clean.
He’ll never touch my skin again, for I
Will sleep with clothes that love me ‘til I die.

You were so beautiful,
Like a marble statue
Behind millions of dollars of security.
But now your insecurity
Has defiled your purity;
The glossy perfection
Turned rotten
At your crystal lips of limestone;
You flawless face, now
Fouled by fatality;
And worst of all:
Your once sweet words
Are now rancid with
Distaste of me,
And it simply destroys
The beauty I see in you,
A beauty greater than
Any Greek statue
Carved eons ago.
You don’t see that your ego
Sped up time’s flow,
Faded your glow.
You’re rubble, my friend,
You’re nothing but old.
My fires of love
Are suddenly cold.

I didn’t speak in fear of saying the wrong things,
Letting my insecurities build layered rings
To protect me from the vagrant eyes of society;
For years I grew up a silent and impervious tree
That feared the men who wouldn’t love me.

But then no, no, then you suddenly came along,
Full of mystery and conversation
In those Watergate lips and eyes like Nixon;
I should never have trusted your boyish conviction
When we met in September and you said ‘Hi Steven”
Like I was the most important person to you,
And how I downloaded a texting app just to
Write “Hi” back to you everyday and how you eventually told me
To change my last name to yours—you made a deep incision
Through every shell of skin I provisioned
For ordinary men like you.

But this is not a love story because
You were just an ordinary man
And I was just an extraordinary fool.
I thought we could drift forever lost
In the desert winds of my dearest dreams—
But love was a mirage and you were an oasis;
I took a sip from the shadowed pool at every cost
And ended up with a mouth full of sand.

This is not a love story because I didn’t know
Two guys could just be friends if they talked to each other like brothers
Because whenever I did, I was called a ***
For trying to pick up where my father left off,
For ignoring me my whole entire life because he cared more about his drug deal
Than his own family.

This is not a love story because you were a guy
And I was too obsessed with being what I wanted other people to see;
I didn’t want to be happy if it meant
Giving up the sweet internal peace that came with being
One hundred percent normal in America’s eyes.

This is not a love story because
It wasn’t written in the Bible.

This is not a love story because we live in a nation
Where having a crush on a guy labels me with damnation,
Where we teach our boys that love is only beautiful if it is in a woman
And that those who see otherwise are sin-ridden;
So many tongues tied to the tips of our teeth
Our nation’s sons and daughters beaten til the love runs red in a river of their tears;
These gender roles wring us out dry and drown us in a shadowed pool of fears.

I can proudly say I was in love with a guy,
But I won’t say it was for the right reasons.
I was blinded by the reality that maybe, just maybe,
Having intimate conversations with a man wouldn’t label me.
And it never will, not now, not ever,
Because I am not an ordinary man—
I am peculiar.
I am not yesterday
Because I am tomorrow night.
I am not a vagrant hiding in a black wood behind the skull
Because I am a redwood, rooted and full
With my outstretched arms soaring high into the sky
Because love is a blind sun that shines over us all,
Making our walls look as small
As the rubble when they fall and fall.

Some heavens ago
I loved you 'til I dropped
On my knees in the bathroom
(Hands chaining my head to the floor,
Body detaining my soaring heart)
And questioned reality,
Wagged my jammed forefinger
At the face of an ungodly god
For permitting my lust for you,
The sin smelling of musty sweat
And fake baking soda
To hide that unsure scent around me—
My primal instincts call your bluff
And I raise myself once more
To hunt for your wild soul,
The game hot and weary
But mortally necessary.
With eyes unsheathed you
Stand aloof—
I'm aiming right at your heart.

Unseen by a careless eye,
The tiny holes
That pierce right through the paper’s skin
Cannot be played with.

These rough and edgy slits
That bind the page
With shiny, silver, spiral shackles
Refuse to give up their grasp.

These tiny holes that dot the page
Are never healed and never felt,
But they remind the paper that
The notebook has a grip on it.

But when the time has come, a child
Slowly rips apart the page:
The perforation pops in pain
And grabs a hold of what it can.
The paper, screaming in agony,
Frees itself at last—
It wanders off to be crumpled,
And hurt, and torn, and trashed,
Only at long last to find
That part of it was left behind.

My skin must be made of crystal glass
For you to stare through me so violently
I shake and shatter into a million pieces,
Your missing attention a sound wave
Deafeningly explosive to my ears.
To you, the brittle layers underneath my hide
Are playgrounds for your piercing eyes—
My flesh freezes over and turns clear
By the sheer blizzard of your neglect.

You stare into me like I was an abyss—
A shallow pit, a dark nothing—
And carry on believing it so.
My holes are things to be respected
Yet they are all you ever look through.
Your apathy has my vicious soul
Suspended in a restless air
Until I feel so unreal that I evaporate
And truly, truly, feel despair.

My home died 8 years ago and I
Never understood why—
No flames that licked our gingerbread house to the ground;
No earth-shattering wave that swept us off our feet;
No ghosts to keep us company—
Just a deep, lingering silence growing
Louder, and louder, more defined
As the hollow floors whined
In rebellion of the years glazed by.