There's a new kind of war.

My blind willingness to follow you
into the darkest and most desolate alleyways,
my undying devotion to your warmth,
the overwhelming desparity of my struggle
all have me cardiac-arrested.

You're the captor.

It happened on the eve of a new moon,
her face turned away to hide her shame
over her daughter's decision to be guided by light.
The night may have birthed me,
but I could not ignore the brilliance of your glow.
Tides must be the forces behind your eyes
because I've seen the ebb and flow of emotion behind them.

Did you know the moon controls tides?

The waves are what bring you and I together,
contrasting yet connecting darkness and light.
Ebb--the moon pulls you towards her with the gravity of her breath.
Flow--she releases you from her imprisonment and into freedom to follow your own light.

Constanty swaying between two opposing forces:
that's when the battle was born.

I may possess enough strength to pull you towards me,
but other forces push you away and into her arms instead.
It is on the corner of her Push and my Pull
that the battlefield called Love was formed.

-mp

My English teacher told me to write about you
in two MLA-formatted pages.

I didn't know how to tell her
that double-spaced words
couldn't bring me close enough to you,
or that Times New Roman
never was the right font.

No, you are of Greek constellations,
stars on the ceiling
strung from Orion's Belt.
You are a comet streaked across my
black canvas bedroom walls at midnight.

I sit by the window during those late hours
and try to write you down,
searching for the right adjectives
to describe the way my cheeks
grow hot enough to
burn paper in your presence.

I never quite nail it.

It might be because of your restless nature,
that kerosene-burning trail of light
left in your wake
as you journey toward the sun.

Take me with you one day.

Pretend that we are two doves
soaring high above trees,
finding home in each other
rather than among crumbling leaves.
Form the letter 'o' in the skies;
take me around the earth in circles
so that we may learn to love
even when life becomes repetitive.
Don't bring me home when we are
no longer suspended in the atmosphere,
no longer timeless.

Forget that clocks even exist.

Call me selfish,
but I only want your eyes
to rest upon my hands.
I suppose disregarding the hour
will force me to turn this paper in late,
but I could never turn in a paper
without an end.
And you are endless,
from the crescent moons formed
every time your eyelids shut,
to the warmth of your sunbeam laughter,
you are a continuous cycle of night and day.

With the moonlight guiding my
unsteady hands,
I search my bedroom,
looking underneath pillows
and behind old pictures
for another word to conclude this.
I stop when I hear a distant echo
that can only be your voice.
Its hollow reverberations inside my skull
remind me why I began
to lie awake so late at night in the first place.
I visit you in my dreams—
it’s the only place you allow me to find you.
Some secret chamber of my brain
must have you trapped
if I am only able to meet you there.

And that's the first time I ask myself:
what love can exist when it's all in my head?

It doesn't matter how cloudless the skies,
or how much daylight is on the horizon when I'm with you.
I will never be more than that insecure girl you see
fixated on her shoes among a group of people.
I will never be more than that girl you notice
clutching books to her body as if they alone can protect her
from the waves you create inside her chest.
I'm just an addition to the crowd,
a person occupying space in the halls,
an obstacle on your way to class.

I'm sorry for being too late.

-mp

What if our togetherness opened
an entirely new galaxy known only to us
for a getaway all our own.

The planets would serve as our new home,
and instead of finding aliens on Mars,
the Rover would uncover dusty footprints
of two lovers' aimless tracks circling
around the bottom twelve times.
No longer will the days belong to Christmas
where partridges are in a pear tree,
or where lovers exchange golden rings.

Instead the days will belong to our universe
and the creatures working to the top will be us;
we will outshine the planet with the light of our love.
We will be bound together so tightly
that even the rings seem breakable.

Images of us will reach NASA one day
and all the mad scientists will be left to wonder
what creatures embedded the footprints on Mars.
They will notice the strange light,
but never figure out its source.
None of them will discover the reason
because they are all too desensitized to realize that
love has no science behind it,
there is no method to the madness--
love simply is.

-mp

Allow me to explain
what falling in love feels like.
You see, the falling happens when you run too fast,
only you don't have a clue as to
what you're running from.
All you know is that your thoughts are
a little too dense and
the pace that your heart is beating at is
a little too intense,
almost as if it was ready to
detach itself from your chest and
start running a race of its own.
But you already know that
no matter how fast your feet move
they'll never be able to keep up.
Eventually you give up the fight and
when you stop you realize that you
made it to the finish line,
only it isn't a line at all and
you were never running away from anything,
not even for a second.
All this time you were running a marathon
with the one you love as the finish line,
and now that you see this it
feels like you have finally won.

-mp

The star-crossed lovers prepared for a mountain hike.
"We're gonna climb and join the others," they said.
And up the hill they went.

There weren't many obstacles in the beginning;
just time for the two to blaze through the trees
and take a moment to revel in the woodsy scent.

It went on like this for a very brief period of time,
but then the tests began.
No water had been spotted since the first lake,
the one they thought they wouldn't need at the start.
One yelled at the other for failing to remember
to bring the all-important first aid kit.
Even then, they kept trekking on.

As they neared the mountain's peak,
each step got a little steeper,
more inclined towards an unrevealed truth.
They would stumble upon a bear or two
and have to pull each other along to survive.
Their feet and hands innately knew where to go
when giving the other strength to run away and live.

Being chased up the mountain began to feel less frightening,
and more like running towards the truth they unknowingly desired.
The final point was reached one day.

"We've reached it, universe. Now let us be among the stars."
Not one sound in response.
"We would like to become light as they have."

And at that moment, the universe spoke its truth.

"You believe that people climb all this way
only for me to turn them into something?
Heavens no, darlings! The answers lie within the journey.
That is where lovers become light.
Your bond is like electricity and together you burn brighter
after helping each other in the moments your lights turned off.
You radiate a glow so brilliant
that it reflects back upon my pitch-black canvas.
My nighttime skies house the stars that you have become.
I have created no such light;
the stars are birthed from you during the climb."

-mp

Daddy, I know that you can't handle the sun
when it shines so bright that it glares,
but can't you see?
Your demons cannot be drowned
by something that you can taste.
Alcohol is of this physical world
rather than the hell inside your head,
and nothing here is strong enough
to drag the demons away.
They are something that you must feel.

I know, daddy, you're tough
and emotions are for girls.
But I'm trying to tell you this:
allow yourself to do the battling
before you raise the bottle to your lips,
only to discover after all these years
that you've been fighting a losing war.

Daddy, how much longer do I have to plea
for you to put the bottle down?
I don't want to think of each swallow
as an invisible bullet through your head.
Sure, you're surviving right now,
but I want you to be like an undying soldier.
Shoot your destructive past and present in the face
and take the demons out for good
so you can come back home to me.

All I see you doing is finding a salty lake
to dip yourself into for a little while,
hoping that your internal ememies flood out.
Only they keep leaking back in through the cracks.
I've become a distant lifeguard,
too far on the other end
for you to hear my last chance calls:
it's either keep me or the bottle, dad.

You think the shouts are the demons',
so you drench your insides in alcohol once more.
I doubt that will be the last time,
because my absence will become one of them now.

Another hated voice is all your habit has reduced me to.

-mp

If you leave,
I won't look at the world the same.
My windows to the outdoors may be wide open now,
but the moment you take a final step out the door,
my windows will come violently crashing down,
shattering glass upon itself.
I'll view everything as if it is broken
and even though I'll try to repair it,
the shards will remain pieces of a past life
that you'll leave me forever trying to fix.

Pity my ruins
and call a repairman yourself,
but even Home Depot won't have the tools
to fix the girl with broken windows.

-mp

The way I look at you
must make people think you're some kind of legend.
And you are.
You're my own book of maps to the world.

In your eyes I see the future.
The person I wish to become is reflected in your pupils,
the tides of change coming together in your oceanic eyes.
Pieces of me get washed away to another shore.
Maybe they'll be rediscovered again,
and maybe they'll be lost within the sea.
The water will keep them safer than I ever could.

Earthquakes begin in the way your smile takes hold of my insides
and shakes them around, turning them inside out
until my shelter is no more than a ceiling of stars.
You've torn down the surface
and I see the world in all of its stark beauty.
An atlas is what you are, my dear,
and your maps have led me home to the world in you.

-mp

Existing is comparable to being
stuck inside of a movie theater,
watching the scenes of my life
projected on a screen that is
small enough to represent the
size that I feel.

On that screen would not be a
film that is vibrant in color and
filled with hues found in daylight,
a sight that would be considered
dazzling to the average person.

A black and white motion picture
always was better-suited to my personality,
painting a more honest image of both
the darkness that rests inside me
and of the specks of white light that
sporadically interrupt the infinite canvas of
charcoaled paint that
long ago dried on the
crumbling walls of my brain.

These layers of paint keep
thickening with age
and the heaviness stopped
feeling artistic quite some time ago.
It refuses to be washed away by
compliments, or what I perceive to be
sugar-laced lies told because
spreading goodness is man's civil duty.

But if I'm being honest to goodness,
believing that the slightest
trace of beauty lives within my organs
fills me from head to toe with fear because
the beauty people often see is
the kind that is tragic and
romanticized to new extremes in the
twisted culture that we call ours.

I do not wish to be art anymore.
My life is not a movie plot
waiting to be predicted,
and my mind is not a painting
meant to be criticized.

I want nothing more than to
be whatever creation I was
placed on this earth to be,
and I need at least one person to
accept the parts of me that were
accidental and poorly designed.
I need someone to love me
despite the malfunctions of my making.

-mp