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.

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

The child draws
a lovely picture
of a house
so perfect
A mother
with a beautiful smile
A father
with presence...

But it's only
a picture,
afterall

The world shall fall as they fall
In their ruin, everything will follow
And so it ends

Bring in the seraphim
Tear the pure clouds, reveal the gods above
If doubt is a stronger virtue
Then I am its paragon

Women fall at lofty feet in a harem
Gorging on peasants' spines 'till faces turn mauve
Fear is the new moral breakthrough
A scale higher than the utmost echelon

The world shall destroy as they destroy
In their ruin, everything will follow
And so it ends.

The snake bite no longer stings
Calloused as a tyrant's compassion
The purest hands do grow relentless weeds
As they laze on the filthiest plots

Kings and hearts mount to slings
Foreboding most malleable deception
Blood spills bright on their letterheads
As truth gets set by red-handed bureaucrats

The world shall burn as they burn
In their ruin, everything will follow
And so it ends.

Marksmen are wealthier than diplomats
Golden bullets to the golden rule
The trend is to laugh at our silence
The principle is to break lives not dictates

There lies no purgatory for these aristocrats
On to the vile ember cesspool
Until then, they fawn in worldly omnipotence
And not one revolts, not even conscience

The world shall end as they end
In their sceptre,everything follows
And so it goes on.

She finds beauty in everything, in everyone
But she can't find any in herself.

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.

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?

Come,let's pack our bags
Hunting hats and all
Perhaps Stradtler is straddling
some ****** *****
Right now, pun intended
Ackley's snoring close to you
Ignore the idiot
Now listen to me
You and I
Let's forget Pencey and leave
the **** phonies who run it

We'll walk the streets together
With no dead ends our way
Your fears scare me too, you hear me?
The world is just too phony
For people like us who escape to live

Everyone tells you to grow up
And forget yourself
Just to kiss and dance with their **** grown up ideas
We are both at a losing end
Finding a close to a story that never really began
Let's just bottle up these *******

Holden, nobody really gives a ****
except the cheap, wretched bars downtown
where  old jokes like ourselves
set fire to the downpour
in our heads with more pain and
then some cheap painkillers
***** a little snooze a little
Some you gain, some you lose

Nobody really takes a look
For a **** second, see?
Except the smelly, narrow hotel rooms
Where we can rest our broken shoulders
And become a child once again
Once again, dear Holden
Non sellouts unlike your brother D.B
The door is to remain close
Some phony might take it against us
Take us to Hollywood
The hell filled with phonies

Nobody, Holden, nobody
We are alone
You and me
And the whole phony world killing themselves
While laughing at our struggles
To live our lives a little honestly

Marmalade skies making love to a ball of fiery mass

led to part swiftly from his maiden’s *****

fertile with the fawn of the trees.

Buoyant as the winds waltzing along the sea

the sparrows poured forth the blue stretch

familiar in their parade, uncertain in their path.

Clinging to infant evergreens

the morning’s dews slid past the satin beds

and into the dreaming earth,
shut and hidden as pearls.

The fortnight’s show of drizzle

hung limply in the nipping air, here to stay for

a bracing encore, wild violets gathering

tribute upon its gray curtains.

Soldier bees on their march

far, far away from the six-eyed castle

buzzing until the forest falls into song
of the sleepful, the land of talking boars
and maidens with golden braids for days

I stand in the midst of all

dazed as an infant

eyes flutter like fans
in the heat of visions

seen but shrouded

solitary but shared.

Beholding in my finite eyes

the horizons echoed my sunken soliloquies

like an imagined memory coming to life.


I was quite absolute then

that I, before what could be

the tricks of the mind

or the dreams of the heart,

am just a split second in an
everlasting expanse

of space and time.

Lost, stumbling in the dark,
I struggled for Your light

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

I really hate this. I hate it when I am feeling nauseous because of so much anxiety and no one takes me seriously. 'You just ate too much' or 'You're just thinking about it' nobody ever listens and tries to probe instead making their own assumptions. I want to get away from here. Somewhere very far where no one knows me, not even one person. I want to live alone with my disease and heal myself because I can feel it coming back again but the understanding I need is never really enough. There are times when there is so much rage and confusion from inside me and idk where it comes from. It is very dangerous because I just find myself becoming violent and wanting to hurt someone. I feel sick of this but I am the only one who could accept this. If people disowned me, I'd probably thank them because truth be told I don't want to see people right now. I really don't.

When artists suffer, they do not become more creative. They become at their very core, human. Suffering is a painfully human experience we like to disregard as the sole bane of our existence. When we try to avoid it instead of empathizing the cause of our pains, we become less human. We are running away from ourselves. A great artist must essentially be stripped of all that prevents him from his vulnerability, his weaknesses and his humanity. Embrace all that he is. That, I think, is ever the only way to create good art. Because art that defeats time is art that happened and most importantly art that fought to live in each one of us.

She told me often when I was six, seven eight,nine and even ten that she used to read books, newspapers, journals (probably even shampoo labels), anything at all, every morning as she carries a breathing lump in her tummy—me. Growing up into a pensive, serious child,  my compounding curiosity was indulged with her providing a plethora of books. From giant, intimidating encyclopedias (I could barely understand but read on,still) to old, dusty fiction paperbacks to her interest in Greek mythology, she never ran out of things to tell me. How she told in a week the story of Goldilocks earning the rage of the three bears  and how I memorized it by ear when I was three or four, recited it in front of a throng of older kids in school. How her eyes glistened at that moment (I could not tell) but in retelling everything, her voice glows with just a bit of pride. She fed me fairy tales and in soaking in their magic, I found a dreamer in myself. I've always been a little different from other kids. A little too curious, precocious, mature, head in the clouds which I have maintained until now. She excitedly told me the story of how Thumbelina in her smallness had a larger than life adventure. How the last pig survived the wolf's bullying through his cleverness. How red riding hood looked dainty and pretty in her red cape. Or how tasty looking  her presents to grandma were. She read them all—every night—tirelessly as I held the warm milk I hated with all my naive heart at that time. I started writing for the school paper, eventually as a news and features writer. I did a lot of spoken poetry, orations, storytelling and speeches (mostly in school and some events) .Mom was in front row seats in all the writing and literary competitions I went to. And together with dad, they shut off the doubtful voices in my head real good.

I stopped writing in high school—when I was twelve. And for a long time, I wandered aimlessly with myself. To make matters worse, I was plagued with nightmares and an extreme sleep paralysis condition that heightened my fears. I often seriously thought I would die in my sleep. I totally got wrapped by my problems and forgot about writing and never got the chance to ask mom how she felt about that. But life paced itself differently when I was fifteen. One crazy dream and an insight in the shower later  and I began writing again. It was like I came from the bottom of a dry, dark well and someone wedged me with a rope back into light. I never looked back down the well, ever.

In all this history and flair for the literary, I go back to the fondness of the days and nights when mom was also my favorite storyteller who somehow put me in this direction, unknowingly. Now that I think about it, I always had an affinity with words. Like birds with the wind, like painters with their brushes. It comes as natural as breathing for me—maybe I should feel happy about that. Behind that deep connection was my mom and her stories that awakened my inner dreamer. One day, I hope to stack all the poems and stories, all the words I have ever written (good or bad) and hand it to her. Just like how she handed me this dream. I'd like to tell her I never stopped writing and probably never will. And in the very first page of that compilation, signed with my slanted signature are the words—*
I OWE IT ALL TO YOU, MOM, THANKS!

-Alex

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

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.