at times i have to remind myself
that the air actually loves me and the car rides last
longer when i'm happy but the sunset will never last for
your perfect picture; my bed is my home
and it's okay to live alone while you're young and old, but never in between;
the music i listen too defines what my goals in life are,
and the voices give me guidance more than you can imagine;
i am my own smile and you are your own teeth,
and i'm perfectly fine that you are not me.

there was a couple on the 1train
and every second there was a pda. my
pupils grew threefold for the opposite reason
theirs did. her boyfriend left at 225th, and i
couldn’t help but look at how miserable she was.
her once butterflies now struggled to fly underground
and fell off the platform near columbia. they lost their wings
the same way i lost love back in the hot month of june.
she became a normal human whereas fourteen stops ago
her teeth were snow and his face was an avalanche and
their lips had a conversation that their
eyes weren’t paying attention to. she closed her eyelids
and i could imagine that her imagination was him holding
her hand; running his thumb through her palm, trying
to predict a future with him in it. they were lost in each others
glasses and they were blind to everything but
their silhouettes. he took a piece of her soul when he left,
i pray he returns it back.

she swore by her five inch heels
that the city lights ran through her veins.
her mother complained about
how she strutted through the doors smelling
like my neck.
i told my father about the way
she smiles when i call her “my little darling” in
cold hours of 2am when she rolls onto my shoulder.
i told my mother about how she rubs my spine with her paint-brush
fingers, hoping to turn my back into a starry night by
van gogh; she’s my shooting star.
her diaphragm syncs to the bass kick of “wanderlust”
and i think i fell in love with her adventure; it’s
not even the weekend yet.

she asked me about my past and the only thing i could tell her
was that the devil is paying me double to see you smile.

my mother tucked me in one night

and i whispered her goodnight

as if i was too afraid to say goodbye

to her when she slept only ten aching feet

from me. i was brought up to

wish upon time; and i wished for the

moon just as a broken child wishes

that divorces were illegal.

as fathers hated the moon because

they couldn’t feel its presence

quite like the sun. as if they just 

gave away their limbs for the night

in a selfless act offered up to a

crying god who loved everything

he made and hated everything

he destroyed with

simple geometric words

that priests never wanted

to prove.


i laid awake on my light

blue bed with pillowcases

who cuddled with me through

the nights and caught every tear.

the stars whispered me

a poem that i once wrote

them and i swore that i

never wrote something

for things who had no purpose

in this meaningful world.

i held on to sand from the

moon and water from my

mother’s eyes; molding a

castle i will once live in.

to the boy i once gave my life away to,
it seems that your destructive
mind has broken my walls. you’re a continent, an
ocean, a lifetime away and i love you with
everything inside of me, but
i have found
someone
else.
i don’t want you to compare me to her,
because i’m not. i tried to make this process
go as slow as i could possibly make it,
from blocking your number, to making sure the flower
petals never fell on the ground anymore.
my hair that night went up in a bun, and the poems
you’re sending me have me worried as to whether
or not you’re going to take your life away, but i guess that you’re not
my responsibility anymore, maybe one day i will still be yours.
please refrain from emailing me/ contacting me/ making
posts on public websites about me. don’t’ reply to this email.
that’s all i have to say.

she moved around the room with such
confidence and sat down on the red satin leather
couch. she lit a cigarette (was it a newport or
a marlboro red?). she told me she was an
angel of god.
i asked her to fly.
she ashed out her cigarette on her veins;
i could swear she spelled my name in black.
the ceiling lingered with a haze and i
didn’t know what to tell her other
than the stories i craft in my head on nights
when i decide whether or not i want to see the sunrise.
she just insisted this was a phase every teenage
boy goes through. but tell why my mother cries on christmas
because she’s being too nice, is that just another
phase, or is she just dealing with her life?
i asked her for a cigarette, but instead she told
me that god doesn’t love the smoke in my lungs,
or the stories in my brain, or the hands that write his name.

i saw you on a balcony smoking a cigarette
between your fingers that extended like
tree roots. i wanted so badly
to just grab you and **** the nicotine right
out of your veins and into mine. maybe one
day you'll be addicted to me.

it began with her eyes, green like the trees
outside 72nd and broadway.
she asked me for the time in verdi square,
but seconds felt like hours the way she caught me.
it began when my heart broke for the 7th time (i’m tired
of trying to put it back together,
i may just leave it a mess for someone else to fix this time).

it began with her kissing my nose.
it began with the way she says my name
(my tastebuds are filled to the brim with her).
it began with a crease in her lips, she smiles
like the moon (maybe i can be her sun).
it began with her breath in my lungs.
it began when her eyelashes strung together
like a violin, and every time she blinks, i swear i
hear “all of the lights” (it’s dark in here and
i’m scared that sometime soon i’ll find a light).

it began the moment i saw her.
it began the moment i told her i loved her.

i believe i grew into my age
when i realized that cavities are holes
and not sugar filled teeth. my heart
has cavities; and i must admit her
lips were sweet.

in my coat pockets you will find:
a bunch of crumpled up receipts scribbled
with love letters i thought of reciting to you;
a pack of cigarettes that i feel is more
for the artistic sense than the addictive;
a mini-lighter on which i wrote the name
of my favorite rapper; and
a beanie she bought me only a year ago.
i’ve taken you on seventeen dates already in my mind
and i think i can imagine the sound
of your voice when you say
“i love you” and the shape the creases on the
edges of your lips make when you smile
back because i said “i love you too.”
but this is only my imagination and sometimes
that ****** thing just runs wild.

c’est incroyable qu'une ville
ne dort jamais, tout se que
je crois faire c'est rêver.

rough translation:
it's incredible that in a city
that never sleeps, all i seem
to do is dream.

1:38pm:
this wasn’t meant to come off as “take me
back” but a customer looks just like you.
1:47pm:
she said “thank you” when i poured her water
and her lips creased the same way
yours did when you smile.
1:48pm:
she looked to her right at table 32, i remember when i brought you
here that evening and we shared an apple **** over
conversations with people i’ve never introduced to my friends.
1:56pm:
maybe 32 wasn’t our lucky number but her smile had that
amount of stars, and i thought about the fact your
stars are still burning
2:03pm:
she smells just like you, i don’t want anyone
else to take away her plate.
2:04pm:
she dropped her fork and i think i fell in love.
2:12pm:
she eats her dessert the same way you told me
“i love you.”
2:12pm:
she’s not eating anything.

she drank slow but had this skip in her dance.
she ordered me a gin and tonic on the rocks.
she eyed me across the street (i’m losing track of time).
she marched in front of me, leading me
to an apartment. the walls were painted black and the
lights were a shade of blue rain.
there were two floors in the penthouse.
she giggled when i told her how nervous i was.
i felt my glass shake, this mixture of pale ale and oranges
resembled a tsunami.
my eyes convulsed like cracked sidewalks during
earthquakes; my teeth were grinding, (not like a dance to ******
but rather the last lick of hope for the protagonist
in slasher flicks screaming for help).
she told me everything would be okay.
she undressed herself and told me god doesn’t
watch her when she sleeps; rather, he
takes the night off and works overtime in the morning.

i fell in love on the second floor of her apartment,
i don’t know why it took me two stories to tell her.

she was as see through as her
fish-netted leggings.
she sat on the quad with flowers tangled in her braids
and a book of poe on her lap.
she told me about how his voice at 3am over
the phone sounds like god, and how his eyes
look like jesus; she was a catholic girl, raised
with a bible in her right hand, and a handful of experiments
she thought up to change the world when she was seven
in the other. she told me about the cracks in between
his fingers, and how they resemble the roman roads;
not perfect, but they all lead to his heart. sometimes,
she likes to picture the way her right eye
twitches when he kisses her, and then she
starts to wonder about him and how he
treats her similar to her father but the words
to describe this aren’t coming out of her mouth fast enough for her to think of the next sentence.
“tell me about you,” she asked.
i write poems in the dark hours of the night you talk to him;
i am envious of whatever faults you find in his fingers.
i never knew god, but **** i swear i met him in your laughter.
i see your teeth in my dreams but when i wake up, you’re still
talking to him at 4am.
i memorized the way your foot lifts off the ground when you’re about to
take another step, it’s hesitant but curious, similar to the
way i want to tell you all of this but instead,
you sit on this bed of snowbound grass
sharing stories of poe and not enough of what makes your
eyes twitch, or what faults you can find in me. open your hand,
place it over my black heart, i don’t remember the last time it turned red.

there are no amount
of words to describe the life
you put into me.

we were eleven years old in her childhood room.
she pulled a pink dollhouse from her closet, similar
to the color of my cheeks; i swear i tried my hardest
to hide it from her. the front door **** was
covered in angel tears, or so she called it. i asked her
where our room was and she
pointed to a red and white door.

“this is my hiding spot. i like to imagine during
school that when we run away together, doors just won’t exist.
i don’t want anything opening and closing other than your
mouth when you speak haikus into my veins.”

my heart races around 85mph sometimes but dear, you
had me going 100 and i don’t know whether or not to stop saying the words i am and my sentences aren’t haikus, but rather sonnets now and -

“just open the door, my lovestruck poet, come inside, take off the
door ****, and live through me. my favorite flowers
are gerbera daisies, they come in all colors like this house, but
you’ll always be my favorite,” she whispered, afraid of her mother
hearing this midnight confession. her door was pink;
she held a doorknob in her hand.

i don’t think it’s allowable
for me to be jealous of someone i
haven’t ever met but i wonder what
goes through your mind when he says “i love you,
my little starlet.” the other
day i swear i overheard the news reporters
on channel seven
talk about the cinderellas that
walk out of your job because you
give them glass slippers and make their parents
actually love them. in the background,
my roommates are talking to their temporary girlfriends and
they’re whispering “he can’t see anything, don’t
worry about him. he should be used to this by now.”
my mother, she worries about me. she told
me to stick to myself like super glue and the only
thing that should separate me is the sweaty palms
from holding your hand in subway cars at **** near midnight.
i need you now more than anything mom. tell me that
i’m going to be okay and maybe one day, i’ll be happy.
i need more than a shooting star, i need the whole galaxy.

her sweatshirt read “little flower blossom”
and her hair resembled a bat orchid; her upper lip
was pierced at each end where she smiled
but why can’t i forgive her for piercing my heart
with her eyes, green like the leaves in summer.

come over and discover me, i’m not as bad as they
say; and sometimes my imagination runs like
lions in the desert at a mile a minute, but now
all i can think about is the fact that your tongue
is touching mine and i’m breathing the air
you’re exhaling and our teeth are clattering
like crash cymbals on the top row of an orchestra
playing beethoven’s fifth opus, never symphonies.
we are music, my dear. your eyes are conductor;
my lips the drummer. you’re allowed to play my
heart like your favorite song.
un pas de plus.
un pas de plus.

he runs his fingers up and down her
arms, playing with her veins like they were
guitar strings; the same way i showed him
how to do that in senior year. i can swear
that the days are dark but the light
in him is just enough to brighten
the smile on the girl that he loves. this is the day
i confessed the november tragedy
(i still remember her voice). he simply
looked me in my dilated eyes and told me that
he couldn’t empathize with me, but i just didn’t even
know if i wanted it. the train cars are my father’s
lies and the tracks are my mothers teeth; separated
by a mere four feet gap that i don’t think i see in my
house anymore.

god forgive my parents,
they know not what they did
or what they did to me.

she can’t see the world and her
glasses are a little too big for her eyes
but she knows that god can see her
and she was taught that was all
that ever mattered. so she talked about
god and skinny dipping in the
first week of april. i think she’s been with this boy for a while
and he sees the body her mother curved out of marble.
she talked about inhaling the halos that come
out of her best friend’s mouth and she screams
“**** life” at the top of her lungs when no one is
around but god is with her; she’s in my mind and
i believe that she thinks of me in the darkest hours.

“show me how you’re different,” she screamed

from her trembling lips underneath the starlit ceiling.

and then she whispered to me, afraid of the angels

hearing her, “show me that you’re the artist who paints

pictures with the backs of his eyelids. tell me that you have

paint transfused in your blood and every time you

cut your veins, you’re really at work and you’re showing the world something

beautiful.” i promised you that the walls of my heart were 

lined with red laced bones and they resembled the birth of

balloons when air is pumped into them. my promises

are about the only thing i can guarantee that won’t shatter like

your heart. “tell me that tonight will never end and tomorrow we’ll

wake up as if the sun never rose again. promise me that 

you’ll remember this exact moment,” i heard her say as i slipped

into my own world. 

i remember the way you bit your lips after they glistened from

the five stars you grabbed from the sky. i still smell that mix of

perfume and lust as if my own father told me about this

during my bedtime stories as a child.  my arms are still imprinted

from where you placed your own as if i was allergic to your

skin and i couldn’t care less for what i was doing. i painted my

walls with the color of your eyes and memorized your breathing

pattern so that one day, maybe i can find an easiness in 

the art of breathing. “goodnight,” she whispered through my ears.
goodnight, angel of the night; your wings have grown but please,

don’t fly away.

i miss the feeling of kissing your lips
the spark of passion running through my
body sets me aside. i miss the softness,
kissing the waters of st. paul river in lyon, i long
to be back in your arms.

its been too many seconds to count since
i've been cut out from your favorite pictures
and that special place in your drawer
where you used to hide important things
from your parents. place me back there,
i've worked too hard to lose a place in your heart.
i've spilled out my heart and it won't go back in the cup.
i'm a dead fish in the hudson river and i'm gasping for the
last bubble of air and everything is starting to blur away.
catch me.

god forgive me, i've left you for so long searching for myself.

every morning at 8:13am, she texts me
“the birds by my window keep my mind running
at 5:20am, just like the way you’ve captured me.
every thought at 2:57am sounds like a prayer if
i think hard enough, but i’m afraid god is gonna hear
me this time. i have this obsession with circles and
i don’t think my life is on the right path.”

but all my mother ever taught me to answer was:
“maybe god will hear me this time because lately,
my heart’s been playing jump rope whenever
i see your name light up on my phone. i pray every
night at 2:56 in the morning so maybe one day,
i’ll be in your mind and god will hear you say my
name in your voice.”
the birds are a present from me, i’m sorry.

she sat next to me near the window
at starbucks on
41st and madison with a journal
covered in pastel lines and a black backdrop.
on the top center read “2011 was the year i screamed
**** life’ and ‘**** me”
as a running header. she ran
through my head, tilting this little snippet
of her brain
towards me and i swear that she looked at me
but all i could do was make the sign of the cross
hoping god heard my muffled voice, drowned out by
the sounds of yellow taxis on the crosswalk and
whispers of angels on the corners asking for my pockets.
i’ve never tasted sixty miles
per hour but i can imagine it’s the same
as when she writes “your shirt looks like my thoughts”;
i’m falling in love too easily.
i want to read every inch of your body; your arms
have the bible etched in your veins and a fifth of my poems
are scribbled on your aortas; my mother’s wedding vows
are in my right eye and my father,
my father just takes care of himself. i don’t think my eyesight is
getting any better, you slid the note two spaces down
and i think i shed a tear but i can’t remember whether
you were smiling for joy or the fact you missed my hand.

she dresses in all black like
someone died but she loves her grandmother. 
i obsess over the fact her eyes are 
the same color as her's but 
the reality is her earlobes are pierced
and her childhood wasn't the same as mine. 
she kisses her mother and father goodnight
and takes off the makeup that she thought would make her
look better. i need you here in the late 
hours of the night where all my mind thinks of is you. 
come by for a little and please 
allow me to hear your stories. i want to hear about
your grandmother. i want to hear you.

the sun is in her smile and
the planes are constant so my
adventure to you is just an
impulse away, dear. my eyes don’t
really twitch in the sunlight, but ****
i swear you have me blind. i think
i’m becoming fond of this lifestyle we set
for ourselves, not the ones our parents told
us at the age of three years ago. time is just
racing and i don’t know whether or not
we’ll win. but i believe in god; he has my mouth
and your voice; he had my mothers brain and
my dad’s stubbornness but this
life isn’t perfect, but i want
you to know that you make it.

and now we’re standing in a dark room full

of colors and we left our morals in the bowl

with our only means of leaving. we started 

singing lyrics to songs we didn’t know,

but we got lost in the beat so nothing

else really mattered; we became our own beat

and you couldn’t help but smile at my

mistakes because i laughed at yours.

and when you leave, you couldn’t help

but care for my safety and i couldn’t 

even make you smile but mine was sufficient

enough. i can give you heaven, darling.

and it’s just so hard to think when my brain

is full of making pictures about how the sky

would look in your eyes

and how the ocean smells

on your breathe and how the sun looks 

when it alters your hair. tell me

when it’s appropriate that i hold your skin

without wandering wallowing away with

nowhere to head but the top of mine.

play with my words and pick out each syllable

you hate and throw it in the ocean, i need to

hear the waves speak to me at least once.

hold on to my memories because

i want your dna on them, i want to know what it

feels like to intertwine you within my brain.

your eyes are the color of walking away;
your mouth is the color of railroad tracks
in winter and every car is holding another adventure
i want to be a part of.
your breath is the color of electricity, and your
teeth are just unwired circuits and your
smile is just another miracle my mother
said i would see one day.
my father spoke of you.
he told me one night as a child
that love was just oxygen. love was
the trees bowing to us. love was just another
natural chemical reaction.
dad, please tell me that this is love.
tell me that this woman is the one.

at 4 years old, she rode a horse for the first time and
felt this sensation  she thought only a book could give her.
at 7 years old, she caught her dad coming in the house
with someone else’s lips on his neck and all she
could remember was how red they were, similar to the roses he
brought home on valentines day every year
(he only brought home seven, the other five were hidden).
at 15 years old, she told a boy she loved him,
but she was talking to someone else.
at 16 years old, she chose me.
at 16 years old, she gave me herself for the first time.
at 16 years old, we got caught by the cops.
at 16 years old, i told her i loved her.
at 18 years old, she cried her eyes out because i didn’t love her
anymore (or so she thought).
at 19 years old, she chose someone else.
at 25 years old, i think she married him.
at 32 years old, i think she was looking for me in the deepest parts of her
mind, but she forced herself to forget how my voice sounded
at 6am when i woke up from her shoulders fourteen years ago.

i think she wanted to me to write this,
but its become a prayer to me how i’ve said her name
under my breath when a priest passes me by.
i think my lips are the same color as the women your
father cheated with, but they’ve been stained with blood
because i don’t want to lose the way you said i love you.
i think too much, and i lost perception on what’s a dream anymore.
god doesn’t wake up in time at 4am to answer my prayers anymore.

i’m measuring my life out in the amount of

breathes it takes me to say i love you

and i’m becoming fond of the taste of

your tastebuds and i seem to dream too much

and never wake up.

and in my dreams i write novels and i’m 

looking for answers on what to name my chapters.

a few months ago i named chapter seventeen
*
Clarice* because i swore someone was leaving me

clues on where to search next but everything was jumbled

together and mismatched like a pair of parents

who hate each other and argue in the night so that their innocent child does not have to hear a word of what god told them.

lay next to me, sweet angel; stay for the night, i will show

you what a home is like next to the snowfall of december.

i spotted her across 72nd street
wearing a red flannel and
jeans that ripped right below her knees.
i fell in love with the idea
she called herself queen and
managed to smiled with only the upper half
of her mouth, slightly biting her lip
as if she was nervous but excited to tell
you about how she sees stars revolve around your head.
i told her years back about how he was just a
phase yet i was a lifetime
while she laid her head on my shoulder to the
rhythm of subway tracks at 72mph.
she wrote about me (i hope) on her palms
with a pen, she called it her very own style of
palm reading (i call her my future).

we asked the soldiers to take us away

with their shiny guns and fire eyes and you asked them

to interrogate me about why

we put flowers in barrels and how did we really even 

start this. we planned on taking over the world

and opening windows so we could breathe for just

a little bit longer. we were confined to only

knowledge no one really cared about but

we thought it mattered. it felt like

the earth had stop revolving and 

revolutions were occurring inside my skull

like children with new ideas on how to make

their parents happier. thoughts turned into words

and here we are standing naked in front of each other

and i don’t recall knowing about your smile.

crawl onto my skin and tell me every one of your secrets; write them within my veins so i know when your blood begins to turn red again.

kiss me gently because i forgot what it feels like to feel this feeling

and i don’t want you to feel the scars on my lips.

so come away, and turn my words into

actions because tomorrow morning

we’ll tell everyone about the stars and how they

never seemed to go down and how

it felt so ******* good to speak without

speaking and read each other like our favorite books

next to the fire of december.

monday:
i saw your angel (or was it a
ghost?) walking to leo.
tuesday:
she won’t leave my bed and
i don’t know how to politely tell her to leave.
wednesday:
i ******* hate wednesdays.
thursday:
i bought you a drink at the bar and told
you my story about my summer
and you simply cried.
but all i could think about was the cranberry and
***** that was in your hand and i couldn’t help but
wonder if she liked that drink as well.
friday:
you sat next to me in chemistry and my professor
lectured about relationships and how chemistry
is the devil in jeans and a kanye t-shirt.
saturday:
i can’t sleep knowing you’re doing better than me
and your ghost won’t stop crying now.
sunday**:
i drove my car seven hundred and twenty miles
on the interstate hoping that she’d let go of my
neck.