There is a place I call Soldier Way  
Sacked at the hem of one ruddy bay  
The open casket of a living ash town

Along the non cerulean periphery  
Waves in battalions besieged in the shores' retreat  
Flitting ceremoniously to a soup of heat  

The white sea calls in a scepter  
Of fleeting air lilies in salt-simmered clouds
Subsumed in daydreams of wet palm castaways

Fiery, elusive pearls praised at my feet  
Then went on to their deaths, fluxing flummoxed  
As flushed touch-me-nots upon human graze 

There, twenty eight steps apart—children cheered  
Flamboyant flowers in a backdrop of a resigned hue  
I smiled against the vigilance of momentary isolation  

In great imaginations, the sea does speak  
To the boulders by the homely sand  
My spring back on their furnaces

As I lie in the refuge of my bed
I wondered
**Where do broken hearts escape?
Where do tired souls go?

My head is knots on knots
No cheeky red faced scout
Oaths to untangle
Except perhaps
people crazier than I

Sullen as a brick on the wall
Imposed as a figurine doll
The ant-like people
Look on and leave
As if I was a bad show,
Their awareness too
untamed for
my script.

Not Scarlett O' Hara
With lovers on a row
No, no, no mister
I am an antiheroine
Waiting to happen
The world is my stage
Unlike Hamlet certain that
I am going
to be.
 
My wings have
Fallen flat on the
road like gravel
But I make feathers
From leaves people
Leave behind
And sew them
Like stitches in
My spine.

No.
I am not the person
You read in books
with jargons sprawled
Like fancy words only
money could buy.

I am stuck in the walls
Everyone stares when
They get too stuck
With pain and alcohol
Dreamt like hallucinations
Refused like a cul-de-sac

Do not play me
Like a ragged doll
Of your forgotten child
Or a roadside blossom
plucked in fickleness
For I have become
This and that.
This and that.
Over and over
The pawn and
The king
All at once.

People are so eager to change me
into someone they cannot be.

You who crossed over
the next decade like a stranger
on slowly familiar lands

No you are not mine to begin with
I merely cut open
Like a surgeon
Only I wasn't saved.

They'll say you tried to ****
me then
What a story
What a cry

The swan song
Plays itself repeatedly
like a haunted rhyme
I am not a listener
I am the orchestrator.

Although I fail to
build from scratch
without reducing
myself to you
or anything at all

Fragility is my downfall
And you know very well
how to shatter.

Sometimes you don't give up for yourself
But for the people who never gave up on you

I'm chasing the divine moon
In its most full state
There in the eagle's claw
Rests my house of cards
The gods hear me but do they listen?
Either I rain my blood on this war for Ares
Or Gaia opens to receive me

I might fall to a ravine
Broken bones and dead encounters comfort me
I might devour the dark pill
That intercepts my self-proclaimed hero

But I long to talk to her
To my muse who strives on the sharpest points
Like the bone that hangs in Cerberus' neck
She must want to bury me in her
Or take hold of my soul
Bless it to the god and her lady
Who dwell near the enchanted river

In this odyssey with nothing on the other end, perhaps
I'd find her whispering me to take the oars
Move along
For as my Tritogeneia
She'll give way to my long awaited Ithaca
Where I'll hold the pen
As she weaves the stories
Above the mortals
Above the gods
Hidden and alive
Since time immemorial

I woke up
remembering
how I used to

shut the world

shut myself

shut them all

just so I could
bury you
into my heart's oblivion

That's how lost you
made me feel

Since when have words abandoned me?
Since when have they mixed up with atrophy not symphony?
I see myself fixed on a page that bears no more meaning to me

These are hieroglyphics not my life in symbols
These are objects not reanimations
These are dots not wholes
I am an eyeless Beethoven
Instead I long for words in my memory

Stacks of blank paper flying around the block
They are dead , long gone, hell bent
No eulogies my old friends
I am simply apologetic
For you ascended me to galaxies
But in a vacuum I can't seem to think of you

I am thankless, the idiot
My mind is a boiling cauldron
With a Salem spell, I must be bewitched
I do not recognize the person
reading the stories like they are rocks
I feel no longer, I dream no longer

The voices in the pages were once
 bursts of 'I'
Wandering muse, exalted beings
Not the cacophonies of devils
in my head
Not the powerlessness of a victim.

I'll stop dreaming before they bludgeon me maudlin
Then run. Run off the mill, playing on a paramount race
The light fumes at the tail of a muffled crawlspace
My calloused heels wait, flaring the barest crimson

The wheel makes the world go round, oh quiet defeat
Fed quite fat with golden grease in gun blood
No sullen faced ant ever bites back to chew the cud
On this highway to hell, ****** in an infinity eight

They'll can me like a fish, consumed to be eaten at last
Those who roar with an industry on their mechanical spines
Smoke the steam from black lungs dying as the lifelines
Don't ask anymore, their hands are wide, lips pressed

It's weird but across history many great things started with a problem.

Where do I feel most alive?
Is it in the arms of love?
In the swift, sad rain?
The first drop of coffee?
Or the dance of swans in the
clearest ponds?

I dont know what pushes me up
With the late morning sun
I dont know what tells me to
Swing along my pain
Like wine in a flask
I just do.

I come passing time with whatever.
I come enduring whenever.
I hang on a thin line
Of 'what ifs' and 'I guess(es)'
Holding my head on days
when I just dont know

I really don't
But I'll live to find out.

The wind leafs through my skin
Like a bibliophile  on his tenth book
My body fixes—destroys, fixes—destroys
Itself every running second
I am alive

I am alive through the universe whispering
As time passes through my
Membrane like a ghost—unseen.

I am not scared of the monsters under my bed
or the ones you told me as you went home from
summer camp—(bonfire stories near the lake
of green-eyed goblins and moon howlers with
famgs that oversee the mountains)

I am in fact afraid of the monsters that knock
at 2 am in the morning prying my wooden
chambers of sanity like its playground

—giants that stay on top of my body as the
strongest and closest gravity I could ever know

—two little voices of small people debating
in a prosecution against myself. One brings me
dishonor, another brings me out of dark,
empty cells

—a vampire of the day that ***** out life
as the sun rises to its crown. Once done, I am yet to
fall in a haze of delirium and ecstasy of the sunlessness
that precipitates in my heart

I am afraid because I know them too well. But the thing is,
**they know me better

They asked: "What is beauty?", "How about kindness?", "Do tell me about love." And then they'll say with much decision, "I could not see them knocking in my door.", "Things like that don't mean anything.", "Ideas are only as good as the humans who fool themselves with them.". I wish I could answer them. But who was I to pile questions with more questions? All those words curled my tongue in contempt, stung with frustration. For I have seen love—in a hospital room full of weeping strangers. I have heard hope—in a church slowly being ignored by the ones who built it. I have tasted gratitude in the last kiss I shared with a forgotten love who left all the corners of my heart in a pained heap.

Love, hope, beauty and all those unbelievable things hanging in the clouds like dreams or illusions for some. Nobody has ever seen them take form—as that 6 a.m coffee, that well-played deck in a gambler's hands, that worn out pair of shoes hidden in the attic chest(probably too precious to throw). Nobody has seen them go for or against the sea. Nobody has heard them grumble like the thunder on a good day with bad weather. Nobody has felt them brush up like the softest wind of the year. Nobody. They're made to be concealed for they do something even more dangerous and otherworldly than living side by side with us.*

They possess.  

*Like spirits who make their home with people. Burning like embers of a small fire, inaudible at first, all-consuming later. Once accepted, they take hold of the soul like their own. And they burn, ferociously, splendidly. I'd like to think all great revolutions of the mind, of the soul, of humans fragile and inconsistent—all started with that fire.What began as silly ideas became lives in our form, in our likeness. We are changed—it will never quite go back. We only have to see beyond our eyes, that they really do live in all of us.

The conceited cackle of green-eyes
murmur deep with their stabs
Laughing is no longer a melody
It has become a selling point
of cries and severed human ties
I'd see flamboyance in an old man with    
cracked maroon lips,purple-yellow
shades of shame in his shut lids
Too shut perhaps from the sneers that keep them down.

The all too used ****** frills hampered droopily atop the bones that kissed
icebergs of words from those who
make him not matter.
One more avalanche
and the prop heeled identity
from which he stands will bring him
down along with the world who refused.

And yet I see his ghost in my periphery
As I watched the parodied tragedies plastered with the loneliest
Faces on them. Bam!Boom! They
rot in dumps, in alleys, in late night lonely strolls revelled with crimson crimes on their arms
And unsaid dying messages about culprits Found but never tried.

And those images they
keep coming back, like prodigal sons asking for
second chances,asking for the
slight nick of eye, a slant of faith
a bread of compassion
For the ****** that they are.
But the forgiver is society and has it forgiven?
And has it thought that it
is not afterall the forgiver?
But the retriever
Of all things lost
The start for
all things to be accepted?

Standing by myself
The memories of you hang like a ghost
Glasses of orange melting in our tired hands
The fact remains to freeze our eyes bare

Nibbling on burnt cookies as they buried
The invisible lumps down to the chests
Stale alcohol dancing in noses
Decks of cards gathered dust in the gambler's absence

Lipstick stains on the cold glass of your coffin
As the women withered and the men stiffened
I'd call you out but my voice went somewhere
Perhaps to the last scene that gave you away

How time catches and lets go
Them who hated you
Them who loved you
Bewildered in the kitchen
You are the refuge to seek
Though you are no more

What to do with a mind that is in a million different places at once?

And with all things eternal and inscrutable,
Darkness has two faces.
There is the sheer silence that resonates with my being
There is the call to become one with it.

I had once seen the horror along its abyss
It had my face on it.
Funny, because I saw my own eyes
Grave, despicable saucers.

But I was as still as the deepest rivers
As calm as the precedence of a terrible storm
Such that I thought I was only a moment's away
For darkness to wholly cave me in.

I realized I got disillusioned because I found out that the world would like to keep me in a certain way. Only some will care about what I dream, what I have to say or do. The rest will keep me in bounds because they  are afraid I'll break out the order of how things work out, how it always runs. I am just tired of trying to fit in when the world is definitely not in my league.

I am coming back to myself. My depression is starting to lift itself off. I told myself weeks ago to turn all the sadness and meaninglessness around. Easier said than done. But after having a serious talk with my mother and a friend who is suffering , I realized once again that pain is telling me to help others carry their burden. I was needed. And this is not to fill a desperate want to have someone depend on me but to acknowledge that through my condition I could understand those who are losing hope/grip in life. I learned some pretty dark things and I was afraid I could once again slip into despair but so far I didn't. Repeating to myself every day that there was something to look forward to helped in many ways. I couldn't write for the past few days but I was happy I had that going on. I mean, the world could **** me up so bad and maybe when I wake up tomorrow I would  be depressed, but writing is something no one can take away from me. Words have become my greatest comfort. Just reading some of my older, crappier works cheers me up a bit. There might be some break downs in the future but after close to five  months of experiencing this, I can get the hang of depression like it's an old friend. It's far too early though to call me normal because my mood swings are ambiguous as hell. But I am beginning to entertain hope and push away the negativity as much as I can. Small steps, small steps

I stopped being scared of the lights turned off,
the night underneath my bed
when I understood that there is a bigger dark within me.