The first time
you said you loved
me, it was as if
I had been pulled aboard
a life raft after being
lost at sea. But
I see now that this
raft is littered with
holes and
we are sinking, but
you are convinced
that your love is a
teacup to scoop out
the water pooling around
my ankles and you will save
us, but the teacup has a crack
down one side and
do you see where I
am going with this?
A tablespoon of water
will never put out
a forest fire; I am burning
through acres.

When will you ever stop
writing your apologies
in cursive?

When will you ever stop
putting them
on sand?

The ocean spills
on a Thursday night
congested in between these four
skinned-down, off-white walls.
You're veering into retrograde,
obsidian and spiraling,
heavy and unsettling --
a plethora of pterodactyls gnawing their way
out of you
except on days like this,
they've grown too comfortable inside
and that is worse.

Here is to nights when pain screams your name
and misses your body
too much.
Pain,
whose unmapped origins,
make you loathe yourself
and everyone else.
Pain,
like maps to places
you don't want to revisit.
Pain,
like an abandoned amusement park
consumed by tall grass,
infested with pests
and memories
the past was never too kind
to make you forget.

It begins here.

In the percolating silence
that lingers behind gritted teeth--
the loose threads on denim jeans
that only ever gets cut,
the landfall that prays
for minimal casualties
except each body bag
contained pieces of your heart
he could no longer mend --
a slightly-timed confession.

The end begins in the way
the essence of the beginning
becomes foreign.
We know about length measurements
from school,
but kilometers or feet
do not weave the tapestry
in spaces between two people.
Distance,
we forget,
surpasses the cataract-like
tunneled notion of
merely its quantitative value.

I see it in the way you've forgotten
how to make me laugh.
How you've got a grip
on my hand
and yet
I'm still reaching out.
How we walk on eggshells
around each other,
and traded in words
for daggers
or words
that didn't matter
enough to land on ears
that swell to listen.
Ticking bombs,
deep sighs,
feeble temperament
waiting for the softest nudge
to topple the tower,
and you’ve predicted
the catastrophe
long before a tandem
of hot flesh
had turned cold,
and bruised,
and hurting.
The galaxies
in our eyes,
rusty,
no longer colliding
into sweet solace—
you’ll realize that
you’ll always be in the
losing end
where you flaunt your
vulnerability
in plain sight
like a mannequin
on the other side
of the looking glass.

Let me stay for a bit.
Let me mourn what’s passed
and cherish
whatever’s left.

On the 21st floor of a corporate building
down in Valero street,
there is an orchestra.
The delicate-paired symphony of
clicking keyboards
and heels tapping on cold cement
to the beat of
practiced impassivity.

The seconds also made sounds
along with a chorale
of both sweet and bitter voices
singing like cicadas faintly next to your ear–
"I told you so".
The second you glanced out the window
will have been the twelfth time;
gawking, scanning the view
like a hawk.
But a hawk is vicious—
and you remember how everyday
always seems to feel like a train ride to
a dead end,
and how Fridays are finales
to a weekly competition
where you reward yourself merely with participation
because you’re here,
you’re here,
but you’ve crawled your way to be here.

You’re not a hawk.
But you gaze down at the people
crossing the intersection of streets
and maybe that’s just as good as life can get.

You’re a lighthouse.
Watching as the hours and people go by
through a small office window —
but how do you call yourself a lighthouse if you
have lost your light?
The script says,
“I’m making a living”
and one ought to take it as it is.
But more often than not
we fail to ask ourselves
if we’re actually living,
or just merely getting by.

Nowadays,
the latter sounds more like a normal thing.

What is rest
but the withered flowers in spring
that never made it?

What is rest
to a heart that has only ever known
the edge of the cliff
as home?

I am kerosene
and you,
a barely-lit cigarette
flickered onto my body;
reminding me of how David
conquered Goliath
-- how even a minuscule
entity could set you
aflame.
We had created combustion--
we had also inflicted pain.
Why do we keep
burning down the ones
we love
to the ground?