I love people
Who I can be silent with.
Who lets the air be filled with unspoken syllables.
Who lets silence be silence,
Doesn’t push it away, unwanted and ugly.
Who makes it beautiful,
Not just empty and bland.
Who makes it thoughtful -  
Lets me see the marathon in their eyes.  
Who doesn’t puncture the air with filler words,
But rather morphs them into something
That when spoken,
Riles up my emotions. Makes me think. Makes me laugh.
Who lets the buzzing in the air,
The sound of breaths escaping us,
And the heartbeats in our chests
Sing in our broken ears.
Who doesn’t tone them down,
But emphasizes them.
Who looks around, then back at me,
And when the tranquility is finally fractured,
It is replaced by something  
Meaningful.

Eyes out the silk-curtained window.
Slender fingers around the stem of a crystal wine glass.
The starry night glistened as it sang to her –

Die, mondaine.
Die, with your diamonds choked around your neck.
Your husband is out with a lowly demimonde.
She’s higher than you tonight,
Or every night, smoking her diamorphine.
What is the worth of your life?
One pearl necklace, paired with an earring
One diamond ring, paired with an anklet
The bottle is your outlet.
You’re just as ruined as that mundane
Other woman. Not so diametrical now,
Are you?

Die, Little Lady Mondaine,
Thirty-eight and with such an ugly fate –
How quickly her beauty waned.
How many tears would it be until
He prayed for her love again?
Her heels brushed the Persian rug
Mascara ran down her porcelain face.
What an ugly fate.

And die, mondaine, they chanted
On a plain and mundane night.
Your furs and heels won’t save you.
Your children, they betray you.

Die, pretty mondaine.
She listened to the mondegreen in her ears,
Sang to her by the moon. The stars.
A prayer.

Closing her eyes, her blood spilled into the wine glass.
The galaxy drank it and wept.
What a diamond, she was,
Lady Ayn.

You said you loved my poetry,
That it was beautiful.
That it moved and writhed like a woman’s body
Under the cage of her predator, flesh pressed hotly against cold steel.
Said you loved how the light flooded out of me,
But you never mentioned how it left me empty most of the time.
You said you loved the fine lines of the words I wrote.
I didn’t know you meant the fragility I always wore
Like a permanent cloak.
You said you loved the melodious rhymes,
But didn’t mention the heartbroken prose that I weave
Between the spaces and curves of my womanly bones,
Eventually turned ugly
And withered with time.  

You loved my poetry so much,
When we kissed, you stole the words out of my mouth,
The metaphors and similes and imagery.
Left me empty of diction as you ran away,
The colours chasing after you like trails of blood.
Left me empty of all that light you loved
And caressed with your darkness.
Caged in your darkness.
Left me weightless, meaningless, loveless
As you take it all for yourself.

I am so empty now,
I almost feel nothing for you.

I hope someone someday
Loves your poetry.

There was this boy I once loved, one of the last ones.
When he walked, a trail of poetry followed him,
Words that came from Poe, Whitman, and Eliot.
His friends were overrated minimalists compared to him.
He wasn’t a lover of literature, although his face read like one
Of those old library books with the yellowed pages and the feel of
Somebody having loved the words before you, running their fingers along the lines
Passing it on and now it’s your turn, but remember, you can’t have it forever.
Oh no, he wasn’t a lover of literature.
His friends told him stories though, and they were ugly ones.
One day he said, “Hey, are you writing stories about me?”

I pause and think about what lies I should spill next

Because although I want to say, “Well, yes, I write you
“Like the ink was spilling and slipping uncontrollably from my grasp,
“Staining my fingers like you’ve stained my heart.
“I write you because your smile is like the world’s currency
“The one thing we die for, bleed for, dream for, steal for
“Slyly taking and unitedly fall when it’s breaking,
“The one thing everyone sees themselves in, reflected so clearly
“Although we couldn’t be more different, you and me.
“I see myself in you, the poetry, the words overtaking life, the beauty,
“You come onto the pages in a storm of passion and dreams, like a fantasy, you see?
“Like something out of Lewis or Tolkien, like the final empire or a savage song
“Or a wrath and a rose, or a castle made of glass, or the dawn when it comes.
“You look like the stories I love so dearly. You are the words that made me dream
“And have hope when I’m alone.”

Well, of course I don’t say those things because Christ, who does, right?
No matter how cathartic, we never say the words in our head, the words that cry to be let out.
We all think in poetry, but say things that slander the works of Plath and Poe.
So I do that, and I cast my exploding mind so far aside, I swear I heard my bones break.

I said, “No. That’s a lie.
“I don’t write.”

“Why do you like to read?”
They ask me, their unseeing eyes curious, undoubtedly dubious, unable to comprehend.
Well, you see…
I sigh, look each of them back in the eye, trying to compress and quantify all that I feel into a single reason without having to choke out a lie.
Well, um, you see…
It is quite a difficult question to answer.
To people like you, perhaps, it becomes an unfunny and sarcastic, maybe basic kind of joke
To me, I read to feel my heart bleed at the twisting melodies of poetry and prose.  
And to say that I simply like it does not quite fit and is merely a cheap counterfeit of all that it has done for me.
It is not only the thrill, the way all the world is at a standstill when my eyes both hungrily ***** and gently caress whole symphonies on a page.
Sometimes they’re ballads or serenades, played in a wide array of conflicting emotions.
In a story, one is always a turn of a page away from a broken heart or halfway to being okay
The end of the world or a brand new start, the rare flare of hope or the stare of death.
Does all that do nothing for your mind, or do you kind of see but wish to stay blind?
People ask why I’m always with a ******* book; well, look,
Let’s just say I’ve had my fair share of backstabbing friends and loneliness is more of a tendency.
And after all that, I no longer wish to blend or pretend to be someone I’m obviously not.
You might have always been lucky in the friend department and that’s grand for you,
But characters were my only ones for quite a time, back before I started writing all these vomited words with the same used-up rhymes.  
And who in their right mind would choose false friends and be fine with a fragile line for a life?
I’d rather be alone, solitary but not all that lonely, because I’ll have a friend within the pages.
Are you starting to get me or have I just been babbling badly?
I think I’d live in a fantasy all day if I could, the silver and gold melody carrying me away
To places where even the broken, the outcasts, the fallen, and the downcast,
They can experience love.

You text me,
Wishing me happy birthday,
Asking me how I’ve been,
And all kinds of other cloying ****.
And when I see you,
You smile and talk sweetly,
Your words like saccharine,
Artificial and with a bitter aftertaste.
As if nothing ever happened,
Or as if you don’t remember.
I smile sweetly back,
A sugary glaze that I paint my lips with,
But I’m murdering you inside,
Your blood and tears like sticky candy canes,
Because honey, I remember
Everything.

I often wonder
When I’m at my lowest
When I shake and squeeze my eyes shut
At the thought of the phantoms
Chasing me,
If phantoms have a memory.
And if they do,
They, who murdered my naivety
And planted this living demon in me…
Can they even remember
What they’ve done?
Do they know the mark they left?
And if not, I think
About how great it must be
To sit yourself down, build a throne
In someone else’s land,
**** all its inhabitants; flood the streets with blood,
Get bored, and then decide
All in one small moment, that
You could just stand up
And leave.