You've outwitted a sandstorm.
Your granular debris
seeping into every crevice,
every crease and fold
in between the stutters
in Sunday mass
and the temple underneath the sheets
on a Friday night.
Tell me
if its really intrusion
in the absence of refusal.
If not,
the moon
retains its audacity
to be beautiful
and us,
collateral damage--
tucked in from implosion.
A means to an end.

The sun gets up
and I'm left to wonder
how I feel nothing at all.

You can't just plant the good
without grieving the bad you've buried.
I've been daydreaming about anomalies
like crooked edges
and predictable ricochets
that stick and go--
like us, like everything.

Familiar isnt always good.
Familiar could be hands reaching out from loose cherry stems your tongue couldnt tie fast enough.
Most days its the name that doubles as the lump in your throat--
how in a busy underpass of faces
it begs to be called.
Love, darling, dances uphill if thats where it needs to go.

Maybe we’re meant to fall inlove,
but maybe we’re not meant to stay there.
Not when I had practiced
loving you by seeing how long
I could stand keeping my palm over
an open flame before moving it away.
Not when my knees had always kissed
the gravel just to make you stay.
Not when loving you
was synonymous to being in a car
that never gets any closer
than five minutes away from home.

And people--
people would move lightyears through space just to
catch a glimpse of the person they love in their orbit.
But one day I drove my car back to the city
with the passenger’s seat empty.
And more than the hurt
I was alone but I knew I was going to be okay.
Those places and faces of where you had left
your breadcrumbs
were nothing but a warm and familiar blanket I could
free myself from if i wanted to.
(If I wanted to)
And doesn't that sound like honey gliding onto your tongue?
But the truth of the matter is
everything familiar
makes me recoil with a single touch.
But it does not hurt to aspire a little bit of healing
its just that ive been having trouble deciding
who i should heal from;
you or myself.
That night
when you slow danced me in the room,
we were off beat
and our feet couldnt quite get the rhythm right.
I didnt know at the time
that that shouldve been a warning.
You were all too familiar
but you were supposed to be a passing breeze
and thats all you were ever meant to be.
You were not love.
You were something familiar.

the moon looks a lot like porcelain tonight
but not in a superfluously verbose kind of way--
more of a telekinetic fragility kind of way.
where the plaid shirt hanging on that semi-open closet
across the room faintly resembles
a picnic blanket that belonged
to a midsummer day sometime in March--
some memories as such now only belongs
in a film cartridge//
or on post-emptied bottles of Prosecco on your nightstand.
I now understand--
why hurricanes are named after people
but to make people--
fleeting, paper people--
your universe
is to trail further and further away from land.
we're too inlove with chances;
too fixated in the idea of emancipating the uncertainty from the "maybe".
lie your flimsy bones on your pillow-invaded sheets darling
and call it a lifeboat.

it's a fragile night
and so are you.

You.
You were easily the light
of my life.
I didnt have walls.
I only had doors flung open;
a warm invite.
A better part of my life
tucked neatly at the back of my mind
where it had grown
a garden of potentialities
and hope
and thoughts like
maybe this time we'll do it right.
Every passing catastrophe
has taught me that the eye of the storm
is where the calmest region of the weather is;
not the opposite.
It goes to say that just because
we're caught in the middle of a calamity
doesnt mean it's always a heartbreak
from here on out.

I admit that your absence almost always
feels synonymous to my bed
stretching out to the side.
It always feels too huge,
empty,
lonely.
I admit that I have not met anyone who loved
black coffee so much more than you did.
And I loved you,
perhaps so much more than you did.
I'm still learning to accept that.
Funny,
how unconditional love comes with
an abundance in conditions.
But they say
you cant really love too much
you can only love the wrong person.

You were an interlude
to the series of my raging calamity.
You were the eye of the storm,
the calm,
the petrichor after a long period of drought.
Registered in my fondest memories.
A parched corsage in a memory box
that shouldve stayed under my bed.
Shouldnt have belonged elsewhere.
Shouldnt have belonged now.
But that's okay.
I'd argue that the imperfect line
where I trace down your spine
is where the earth grows soft.
The soil,
damped,
the last time I've ever looked into your eyes;
the last time I will ever look into your eyes.
Reeled out the last remaining molecule
of my peace
and gave it to you when you lost yours.
Loneliness isnt
the absence of peace,
I have realized.
Loneliness is just love with nowhere to go.
Like yellow cars on a bus lane.
Etched out of place
but only because the signs
are obscure and hazy;
a product of naivete,
a voluntary free fall.

You will perpetually only be
my great perhaps.
And that's okay.
I've learned to forgive myself
for refusing to believe that
in the past.

We were driving my car
out of town a few sunsets ago.
Had just gotten from the shore,
uphill on an 80.
Every headlight
like a good newspaper headline
to your cracking Sportage leather seat—
the steering wheel as heavy
as my breathing.
Fog devours all the windows
and if the engine participates
with the general meltdown
least i can do to help myself
is call a mechanic.
Hey now
stop peeling the last
bit of skin
on your already-bleeding lips;
you’ve gone past the necessary pain
now youre just prolonging the
sight of red.
Even traffic lights
turn green once in a while.
There are no dead ends from sharp curves.
Maneuvering always seemed
like cylinder blocks on your shoulders
But now youre steady;
too steady
unmoving
and it’s scary isn’t it?
To simply be
unable.
An engine
you cannot engineer—
navigation
you cannot decipher.
Cut throat mechanism.
We’ve passed by
too many yellow lights
to forget
we sometimes need
a bit of a slowdown.
And perhaps you’re gonna
have to go through
the kind of adrenaline
that digs your nail
underneath your palm first.
The current
leads the batallion.
Even the strongest
require a running start
before the leap.
Breathe.
Twist the key in the ignition.
Drive.
The fog eventually subsides.
The mechanic eventually arrives.

What i’m trying to say is
my car broke down in the middle
of the road.
A slow descend.

I counter the shaking fist.
At least we didnt crash.

when do street lights
in ghost towns decide to flicker
until it recognizes its lack of purpose?
glistening gallows
bountiful burlesque
a kind of love that grabs the hand
that looks the most familiar
on days when the sun
glistens on skin that isn’t
patched against yours.
profanity becomes a prisoner
in your rib cage.
decaying but alive,
like ghosts that draw breath.
blindly fumbling
hungry greedy mouth
with eager needy hands
a strange audacity—
a smirk on the corner of your lips
veiling the corruption
between your teeth
i’ve made a habit of making my
tongue bleed
but that’s never going to come close
to the blood drawn
from your grenade-ricochets.
detonate my pulse
in all the ways you had ever
intended.
punic faith.
lungs brimming with fib.
stern and destructive.

how would one know
what to do with all this hurt?