I can't make brushes
dance all flamenco—
red, blue, purples
on a peacock's feathery
canvas

Nor can I raise
unborn symphonies
from a string's womb

Instead, I piece
words caught
like fireflies
in the air
stir their light
through and through
in cosmic metaphors
in sea allegories
in flights of soliloquies
in lovelorn colloquies

Really,
I can't dazzle eyes
nor fuddle ears
but I behold
the days to come
with tongues from
yesteryears

I never for once thought that I'd take writing seriously. It was just one of those passing things I did when I was in fourth grade (and it was journalism, even). Short stories became a breather in high school but somehow that stopped too with the revival only happening towards my end in college.

Ever since then my life has been in a kind of complicated knot. It's hard to get out of but a lot harder to understand. There are days when I like what I've written and sometimes I just want to burn my notebook with all the poetry I made. Every single time you get this brilliant, excitable idea come to you from nowhere, your blood springs up, you sweat the small stuff, your fingers itch—that kind of nonsense. But the writing part is a hell's worth of tricky. You see I'd start writing then stop midway because my brain shuts down in the best times. Kind of like a sprain during a running momentum. I feel terrible because I can't move on from that sort of limbo. And then I swear at myself for being too stupid and incompetent—it's insane. It can't be undone, it's somehow part of my process now. The worst thing is I get even more riled up if I don't get to write down that idea completely. The immense relief I feel when I finish a story or poem is unimaginable. It's comparable to having a cavity lifted out of your sore mouth. You can sleep better, do things better. Ball of stress but it comes from your thoughts.

Now that I am too invested in writing, there is only the fact that I must continue this no matter what kind of life I lead. I might become a diplomat or a crackhead (who knows life is fickle) but I think I need to write or I'll be doomed in my world of ideas. Writing is the closest I can get to a relationship lol and I humor myself in the silliness of it all. Honestly, I feel empty not doing it everyday but at the same time it gnaws on my biggest self-doubts. You know you're in too deep when it becomes a reason for being depressed as it is your hope in the ******* days. It has been with me in my extreme highs and lows and in times when I don't think anything is important.

All my entries here in HP are truly my babies. Which I also call out on my bad moods and frequently tell myself that they are utter crap. I'd work so hard to expunge them out of my system but if people tell me they're as hopeless as a Thomas Harris fiction then I don't mind, I plan on getting rejected anyway just so I can take writing even more seriously.

Though I realized from all of this that writing is not for the blind optimist or the stubborn pessimist. I'm more of a realist. Poetry, literature do not go with people who fool themselves with lies just to be happy. Luckily, I am not the sort of person who will compromise my thinking just so I could smile like a marionette. With writing, I realized that some of my beliefs were illusions that we tell ourselves. And I left them because I'd be lying to myself. This is probably why I've been writing darker material. Nobody wants to talk about them because they leave a bad taste in the mouth, so why not, right?

I've come to believe that our existence feeds on dark and light. (That yin and yang stuff is starting to make sense.) People thrive on two ends to grow and being happy all your life is completely overrated. Pain, sadness and death are some of the things I embraced thanks to writing. Hey, we can't have everything, it's better to just tolerate the different sides. If you deny pain, you will never understand the pain of others and how will you ever learn compassion? And so on. Writing has taught me that crap is crap until you change your perception and acceptance of things.

So all in all in this annoyingly long rant, I've exposed how I'm a self-absorbed little ****. Sorting things out has been my top priority since everything (except writing) became boring as **** to me. Not even food could cheer me up and that is a big sign that things have gone the wrong way. My mom complains that I've been sleeping too much, been extremely lazy but I saved her the bother of asking incessant questions because my depression is too hard to explain. Just the other day, I thought of doing extreme sports hoping the adrenaline rush could kick me out of the slump. But I also thought about getting bored with them so nahhh.

The clamor and crash of the crowd
The sharp tongues of the hypocrites
Do not deter me
For I,
I believe in myself

The rules that aligned reality
The prejudices that vacuum me into a box
Do not grip me by the neck
For I,
I believe in myself

The life of a pariah
The fate of the defeated
Tremble me not
For I,
I believe in myself

Days of disaster and chaos
The years of misery
And the heartbreak of living
I shall smile upon them all
For I,
I believe in myself.

I am wine in a jack-in-a-box cellar
Wonderlands, neverlands propelling in a boomerang war
Exalting stubborn as weeds in the gardens of well-tended graves
As far off as the most withered waves

I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

Eyes turned upside down like folded floral peels before a fallen angel
Rubbing errant pointed brushes against an airy easel
The teapots are now dancing round rainbow tornadoes
Clocks reverse themselves in a scourge of a prose

I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

Singing horses dallying kings and queens with whips of cod
Skinny, scorned nutcrackers lolly gagging for a later maraud
Spoons racing Jack and Jill down a spiny valley of prats
I'd shut them off, they come alive with vicious spats

I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

My trappings with all things mad
Wafted me ajar a silvery smoke of sad
I breathe the clouds of my helter skelter
As if in every catatonic whir it flutters rises an answer

*I'll drop my roses of singularity
And let the world leap topsy turvy

Til when will I snap out of this. I havent been reading or writing poetry like I used to. I'm so mad at myself and of everything bec it feels listless and aimless. I love what I used to do and given the chance I'll pay a leg for it if I could. But that passion seems so far away I only ever dream about sleeping or not really giving a **** and the days pass on like fleeting whispers and I hear nothing, I know of nothing. How did anyone live with this preposterous ******* I'd like to understand how because my days of tolerating it are dwindling down into a deep desire of wanting to see something burn and smell the smoke and hope it possesses my ******* senses. i hate this i hate what has become of my sanity of my body of my feet they all betray me like an idiot ******* out of my ******* hinges I am. I am screaming into a vacuum that nobody goes to the ****** lie I just want everything to be okay because I cant stand another year of blind inferno this is not fair this is terrible it's like dying with your eyes wide open forcing you to swallow all your pain and do not complain you ungrateful coward this is the life you will have give or take shut up there is no point. I am mad and sad and everything in between i wanna rip the ******* edges of those weaker than myself but I cant but I wont idk why but it's for that that I am still on my limits

So on a night
As dry as a seed
The fourth child
Leaned in towards the darkness
Barely a summer's past of his sixth year
He bubbles with the hope
Of children so unaware
They mirror a blank sun

As the abyss catches on
With his flaming wonder
He saw a gleaming mirror
Of himself upon the dull walls
Waving like a tide
On the high cliffs
He goes and goes
Unstoppable as a waterfall

The shadow looks back
Black as his eyes
Fluid as the tips of his hair
It resembled a cloak
Inscrutable like fear
Familiar like beauty
Mirroring the infinite glide
He strokes with the brushes of youth

An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
Inflections of the same stock
Light the destroyer and creator of kin
But the child
Smiles to himself, undaunted
His counterpart toothless
Breathless as a rock
Could not.

Everyone is a work of art
and at some point of our lives
we want to become a masterpiece

I know it's hard to say yes
to the fists and clamps
of pain
to reconcile with the
fact that like the thread
you must go through
the small sliver of
needle relief
simply because
you still are not
the person you are

And you'll hit and miss
so many times
in innumerable ways
until that small,bright
area becomes your
own.

"You sound off."
"Maybe I am or you heard me wrong."

Mother those dead people in the books
Who pen tragedy, brew empathy in a whisk of their words
Seem to understand me better than you do
And to think they say mothers
Have intuition
As razor sharp as your mouth
For someone with so much ability
You fail at seeing nearby distances

No I will not become a mother
Like yourself
I refuse to believe a world
That doubts me as I am
I am a woman
And they see me as less than a man
How absurd my fictional mother
Maya Angelou made me think
I was more

Read Sylvia Plath if you could just
Maybe you'll hear the voice of my soul
Which you have rightly marked
By your own answers
No I will keep wearing
Worn out sneakers and dip them
In mud once in a while
Also, I do not want anyone
To tell me my femininity
Is anchored on fair complexion,
Rose red lips that open
Only to say yes
Because it is not mother dear

You see I have learned a lot from pain
To understand that what is good is
people as they are and were
I have learned enough from a curse
That lives within me
(And which you dont seem
to comprehend)
That I believe in myself
No matter how much
Broken bones lie beneath me
I've died so many times mother
But I lived again and again
To be mad, to be absolutely
irrevocably insane
Headfirst, a marked man
But nevertheless alive
Before those who tell me
I am a nonexistence.

“I love the rain and how it tells me that even the great skies cry over something, too.”

As the artist drew his stroke to a stop
As the musician caressed the strings of his guitar
As the poet scoured his mind for a rhyme
As the writer explored the maze of a story

I thought of the countless people
Unable to live as they wished
Perpetually condemned to
Ruin their lives for a slight feel of money
For a chance of survival
Even in the face of false hope

A young boy hauling a package
Heavier than himself
A woman feeding others herself
To feed her family
An old man withered by
Domineering machines and meaningless work
In his entire life

How can life be so funny
And gloomy all the same?
Passion has been gained, all dreams had been lost
If only the world lived a little fairly
If only dreams do not come at that high a price

And all those who gave me goodbyes
my distant father,
a kind friend,
an unforgettable lover,
have looked on to their beginnings
while I held on to all those torn ends

When you spread
out to the world,
scatter scamper
'till you get gone
with the shimmer

It's as if I,
I
Am born with a void
The silence is an invitation
A banquet
Filled with unlit chandeliers
That only I can dance with

Nothing is around except
The grand hall of 'I'
Laid bare like a naked body
Unarmed and yet lethal

Melancholy
Is my infection and sensibility
I rubbled in a cave
When the rest stood on empires

It is a cat and mouse chase
Fooling one that
No one gets eaten
But I,
I will be

It would only take a blink
Before every sadness seeps
In my glass skin
And I am done as a crystal jar

It would only take a fickle sun
Before every wicked order
Rhymeless or not
Claims me with a Judas kiss.

There is an absence of light
screaming around me
It is the first of February
the night crawling, an obituary
Conspicuous and hung with death.

A blackout
the local electric company
has yet to be friendly
I didn't mind
The air was young and a tease
Through the windows it approached
Like a growing fire
Closing in on my bare ribs
Soothing my sore mind

Out on the receiving territory
Comes the warm excess
Like oranges hilted on wax
It was sad claiming
They wage brighter wars
Than my soul
But I inhaled their spirit
For a quietness lived in their glow

Barks scrape against the summer dread
Unable to shut their stubborness
They connive with the crickets
For a night of overture
I can smell ambivalence
In the starless skies
Will it cry?
Or will it die along as with everything?

I'd embrace the cold with
My equally hostile arms
It treats me with dignity
From outside the cars screech
Like a wailing woman
Stalling the witch's eye
With fragments of yellow and white
Onto the oblivion of the roads
And the loneliness of a night just
Coming to life.

Like how a snake's venom
Is its own antidote
Both of us too
Are each other's inverse
Condemned to give pain to the other
While being the only ones
To cure, to relive
And to mend the broken pieces
Our poisons have shattered

To this old, defeated apple
Skin blazoned in rosy tunic
Slippery as fate discarded, fate in a bubble
How you've crossed my sight like a cynic

You rest cold and unamused
In my warm, subversive hands
It's as if your insides have set themselves loose
Unarmed in their pure dwindling strands

Fat worms whiffed spotless fields of honey-gold
Floundering shallow water fishes in unconscious fathoms
Seared the sweet flesh with spawns in manifold
You stand still in spite of downtrodden autumns

I took you in my mouth, your rot conspicuous
As if you whimper upon my numb tongue
That you won't last an age longer in this limping malice
Where your seed grows only to get wrung

The heat opened a casket somehow
Entombed in a white hot vacancy
Rests my summers day melody
Of gentle feet patting crunchy gravel
Along the pink spines of swamp snails
Out there with listless goats inhaling
The moss infected water
And how I am trapped in my protective
Jalousies like a silly little lifeguard
Waiting for a dip in the surface
An action in the preface

The fields are screaming silver mutiny amidst
The drought on their legs
What travesty happened here?
What reverie of the cosmic nature?
They left it bald as an onion
Sifted as cement
I can hear their pleas
To drop them my sweat
Like a mother to her children
All to ease their parched throats

The wind hangs like a scandal
Whip there, calm somewhere
Or a fusion in between
As fickle as my feet could carry me
I feel like a sponge in all
My sublime holes
Waiting for rain to drop its mercy
Submerge me in its ocean of rumination

It is horrible
I am fried like chops
Of hard meat about to skitter and burn
Rare you say?Not possible in this
Omniscient oven.
The birds turn brown in my eyes
Like lumps of soil with feathers for feet
They seem to be getting along
With the unforgiving sky.

At the other end of this muffled line, I hear rehearsed tears of steel, plops of fresh rain from kisses of young May. "Come home," you tell me as the telephone embraced me more warmly than the wall that has risen high and hard between us. I'm sipping stale coffee as you talk me down to my lowest corners. "There is never going to be a love as mere as ours," I proved to the held voice that has missed your outspoken lies.  *

Stop calling me.
Stop calling me.
Stop calling me.

I never want this cold.
Not when it comes from you.

I'm crawling like a worm
 in this earthly pain
My face is a river bed,
my eyes a running pool
No wonder I am trying to surface
From torrents I cannot fight
As brave as I want
There are daggers in my blood
They slip out once in awhile
Say hello to me like old
friends from war
Leave me with more shields
Instead of fragments

I shut off the light
 and  feel more alive
Than ever in the dark fields
My home, my sanctuary
My strength, my apathy
When will the stars
Descend to the walls
Grounded as rocks
To your endless beauty?
You are so beautiful
But so terrible
I worship you dead rose
Worship you with wonder
And gravity
Dark, dark the light has left
Left left me
But you have not.
Not you.

Everything can drop
Before me in defeated arms
Like mind leaving in mortality
Like hope dissolving eventually
Not you.
You you you
Not not not
Never, most probably.
Never, most fittingly.
So my dear, veiled flame
Catch-22, alter odyssey
What does this say
About you and me?

I will look at fear
in the eyes today
and defeat it with Your power

I have killed myself
thus far with only caffeine
in my string of nerves.

Anxiety looks on at my
hinges loose with each patter
of its dark grooves in my lips
I feel as tensed as
I already am.

My mind suddenly
pitching thoughts of
five or more different
ways I'll go gone as I pursue
the silent knives
in the kitchen or play along
the open danger of the fields.

I am dizzied up in heaps
of misty scenes under
each blink like the milky way
taking home in the blankets
of my lids.

What has spun dimless
like bright-eyed goblins
in the tightening of my ribs
creeps upward and downward
both of us lost in the tremor
of coffee,coffee and maybe
even some cream.

One cup, one cup
of all that is grave, unsolicited
of all things frail
stirred in a cauldron of my
own fairy god witch,
paranoia that *****.

But as I concur needful of
the eartheness, the subjectivity
I am hopeful, I am vital
I am called to hear life
beyond my worry
of dying as the world watches
on with coffee in their hands,
perhaps brewed
perhaps ****.

Juxtaposed between fear
and hope sits coffee for
some ******* chair
of a reason.I have hung on
to it like poison and antidote
mixed like hot and cold tea,
like Hades and Persephone.

I have wished for it
to stay with the fallout
of scuttling equilibrium.

Because it tastes so wrong
but it makes me right,
somehow,  somewhere
I can't quite place.

How disbelieving and cruel
That we are embroiled in wars
Yet no one takes charge
No one takes hold of the pain
Not until they've seen blood
Peppering the ground like a vineyard
And canyons like fireworks
In the air
Not until the ghost of Hiroshima
Haunts their backyards
Not until their souls jump out
of their doors
Not until the streets carpet enemy boots
Not until guns lay in tables with the evening coffee
Not until the television casts a shadow of panic
Not until then, even.
Not until gunpowders fuse in with the uninvolved morning dew
Not until everyone talks about it
Not until expensive towers devalue into rubbles
Not until a dreaded call about the dead stabs a mother's ears
Not until a child becomes an urchin on the streets with no memory of his father
Not until bones break, souls crush under the gripping theatrics of war.
Not until the eyes see what the mind does not believe.
Not until nightmares take shape in stories
And maybe not even then.