What goes on in my head?
The words start playing with themselves and I try
to make sense of the nonsense occupying what little space there is left.
It is so hard to explain what goes on, in, under, above, across
when all I want is a projectile through this skull.
Some nights, I'm as scared as you are.
The noise louder than panicking sirens as I cower
hoping it all stops
before it's too late,
before the worst
yet most relieving end.

But sometimes I grow as numb
as the people who think they know
a ******* thing
when they don't.
THEY DON'T.

3 AM is for studying ways to make death look like an accident
so I don't hurt anyone else after the process.
I cry my nonexistent heart and soul out
like I never do in broad daylight
while using neon highlighters
to mark exes on my throat, my wrists, my chest,
then put both blades out of reach.
I try to memorize the places where I shouldn't hurt myself.
But I am already bleeding everywhere.

I don't want to hurt anyone else.

No one wants scars around their hearts because the hurt doesn't count
unless you're dressed up for death in a hospital gown
so that everyone sees it,
so that everyone ******* believes it.

I'm not stupid
just sick.
But, if life is a lesson
I quit.

I feel like fading ink
gushing dry on my pile of unread books.
And maybe all those
record stores, libraries, museums, cafés, lighthouses
and sunsets waiting for me
won't wait any longer when I'm gone.

I don't want to hurt anyone else.

It's 3 AM again,
one day
I really am going to lose it.
But for the meantime,

I am tired.

I don't know how
long I could
keep fighting
this.

I don't want to hurt anyone else.

It's 3 AM again,
and again
and again
I'm sinking.

It's 3 AM again,
let the ghosts back in.

Before everything

i. I never knew four letters could melt
menthol candy-like, hydrochloric acid on my tongue
and keep burning it in different degrees
I had to swallow back.

ii. That there would come a time
I'd have to baptize the pain in my chest like seasons
robbing me lungfuls
on January, September and December nights.

iii. That my blood was really ink I needed to stop using
before my skin turned paper-like.

iv. That my heart had an epicenter pumping a magnitude of earthquakes
that made me tremble helplessly in its intensity;
and that they were man-made calamities
followed by harsh, heavy, whipping tsunamis
to flood my grave of bleeding, jagged fault lines.

v. That aftereffects lasted longer than treatment itself,
and that I didn't need any professional diagnosis to know
I was terminal
from the same drug that made butterfly-strokes in my veins,
whose arms withheld the only elixir to this malady.

vi. I named my sickness, my pain, my agony like orphaned children, after you--
a rare disease
the doctors didn't even know about yet.

vii. I did and I doubted
but a part of me beat signals
that echoed off the cave walls of my skull
that I knew.

viii. Before everything,
I have been warned
but I chose to listen to the soothing, wrong, hopeful voices
"He means no harm,".

ix. You began spreading like an epidemic-- a tumor to a colony of cells all over me-- until I became you;
a reflection of familiar suffering and mortality, slowly withering away.
In the end, I didn't even have you to blame
for letting me overdose from intakes
of my own ****, bitter medicine and unforgivable mistakes.

x. I guess, this was how you wanted the price to be paid.

Do you remember the questions
you used to ask about dying?
About grief and then pain
that wash over you in freezing pales of regret?
Are you supposed to remember every minuscule detail
before you completely forget?

You choke on your own verses
to convince yourself
and then everyone else
about acceptance--
the magic that should lead to recovery
yet, knowing that
most poems
are just lengthy epitaphs
for all the people
we refuse to bury alive;
that most poets die
as they try to relive
faded images,
wishing they could
turn back time.

There is love in lamentation--
in how the living die with the dead;
how years of November air
become the oxygen
that slowly suffocates them,
how the things they love most
create consuming black holes
they still succumb to
long after
their beloved's faux passing.

I left it here,
came back
a different person
searching for
the same object.

Three years
of moving back and forth
searching for it,
frantically blind
in every nook and cranny,
in eyes filled with words only
I couldn't read,
in corners, seams,
**** even
web-like cracks on the walls.

I kept searching
til it drove me
mad.

They say lost objects show themselves
by the time you've stopped searching,
so I did.

I stopped searching,
see it's already lost.

We are both lost.

I don't know where to find it,
and I don't think it still remembers
its way
back to me.

I am one
learning how to
carefully seal
myself shut;

still working on
the art of hiding
in less obvious spaces
that won't give me away,

folding myself
onto myself
like messy origami
forming no figure,

my pale skin
being tinted by sunlight,
my hollow cheeks
being surrounded by sunny faces

that have no idea
how much all I want
is for the rays to
melt these glaciers.

I tie my hair
with bright red ribbons
like I am a present
with no future, no past.

Might want to unwrap me
only to find a box
empty,
consumed.

I do not hold
anything

for you.

I cannot even hold
myself

for me.