in your arms, i find warmth.
i find 90s grunge band posters and fairy lights entangled on the walls with the scent of burning incense that has been lingering in the air around my nose for quite some time—a sensation of bliss between my cupids bow & chin when the sun touches my swollen lips with her soft & delicate ones—how does one tell the angel of the clouds to bring a storm down?

i find a remedy in our tomorrows
and a home in our forevers.

I. YOU CAN FEEL IT IN THE ATMOSPHERE, TEARS OF MY PSYCHE FOR YOUR SOL

II. HANDS RISE AS IF IN WORSHIP, LA LUNE SLIDES ON MY TONGUE & DOWN MY THROAT LIKE A TROPICAL JUICE

III. YOU EMBRACE THE STARS, I EMBRACE THE CLOUDS

IV. WE SING AN OFF-KEY MELODY FOR THE MORNING THAT RISES

V. WE SING AN OFF-KEY MELODY FOR THE MORNING THAT WILL NEVER COME

it was june or july or august
everything i could never say carved itself my esophagus, the words that would never escape – you made sure of that. one hand wound around my throat and the other cradling her blushing cheeks.

she slips away but your grip only tightens.
fingers scraping – my flesh beneath your nails as i learn a new kind of silence. just a little longer, i’m almost gone. trapped like a bug encased in amber but when those wilted wildflower eyes meet mine, you know i’ll always forgive you.

my lips flicker like a flame as i wonder if i’ll slip away too.
of course not & you like that. push on the middle of my windpipe, crack it like a glowstick and watch my lucid acid purge from my throat in neon technicolor – you do it in a way where i’m both alive but running through the afterlife in white gowns & red stained feet

you recite those wendigo apologies while they look in your wildflower eyes, you purge those auto repeat explanations and how it will never happen again – but we both know it will. your testaments are all folklore, but i always keep reading it.

you lick the blood filled sorrows into my skin and i forgive you.
and i always will because daddy always showed that when a man loves a woman, he hits her.

you don’t know me anymore
and truthfully you never really did.

you knew the parts i painted with my wrists but never the ones i created with my wretched heart that you repeatedly squeezed too tight and had me clean up the mess.

and if i’m being honest, i never really knew you either.

we both had a fantasized version of each other and what we desired each other to be, only to have reality sink in years later.

i was always five steps ahead while you were taking the fast lane to get further, never fully meeting our destination and mark.

the last time we talked, you apologized for the way you were and that you’ve changed

but if i learned anything from you,
it’s to never trust a wolf with no teeth

because they never know when to stop.

they say misery loves company and you made your stay longer than needed, overstaying your own welcome. and i’m not sure if you noticed, maybe you did… but when the time came to pack up your things you forgot to take your misery with you.

maybe I’m just out of metaphors.
or maybe you’re just too good for them.

i tried listing the ways i could describe our slow motion romancing, but my tongue is always left with a dry taste on the surface. i tried naming artists that brought me to my knees but they could never compare to how you bring me to them today. no creative suites are worthy to be grazed metaphorically with your name in between the syllables.

maybe i’m trying too hard
or maybe i’m not trying enough.

the glass is half-empty and my phone has been lighting up with missed calls from my muse, where have you been? where did you go? will you come back? i tried ringing my creativity but she left me with dial tones.

i can’t sit here and say i never thought about running away from you. i run away from anyone that gets close enough to brush against my rib cage towards my heart, i never liked the way their hands felt. iced and reeking with their desperation. maybe I’m just too tired of the same old thing, maybe i’m just really stuck on you.

maybe, the metaphors weren’t on the page
but in our yearnings for each other to turn around and taste the eclipse.

this love of ours had always been a lie. a fabricated story that had gone too far and twisted our hearts in more ways than we were ready for — more than what we could ever afford. with fleshy gums you ask me why does this hurt so bad and i tell you it’s only to make it fair — passing out in midnight hues, i tell you i love you despite knowing the ache in my chest with each syllable i bleed only intensifies and i crave nothing more than to be swept in between the cracks of your winter undertones and to be left in your ruins. you tell me you love me despite the crushing of your windpipe making the echoing of sobs erupt bitterly in your chest cavity, the flames that rise in your belly make you want to itch at it yet you yearn to be set ablaze.


because i asked you with fleshy gums of my own, why does this hurt so bad and you look me in the eyes and tell me its only to make it fair.

and i’m sorry but i cannot get over what happened this time. i cannot get over the blood shed and the tears that echoed off every wall in the room, my cries for you to stay while you kept shoving me out. i cannot get over the ache in my chest when you went back on everything we swore, because darling, real love does not go away like that and i question now if you even know what love is.

maybe it was foolish of me,
maybe i’m just too naive. but the way you held onto me both in a way you were scared i’d dismantle on you but enough to bruise, you were so gentle yet i still found your claw marks painting my skin that i worked so hard to heal before you.

i spent my nights questioning my own reality, wondering if you were the monster in my closet or the ghost under my bed. neither were safe, nor were they supposed to be something to romanticize but i preferred you being a ghost because at least then i wouldnt have to feel your touch.

and i used to think that was wrong of me. i was ****** up. because why on earth would i not want to embrace and melt into my lover’s touch? his arms that he vowed to have protect me?

vows. all that you constantly went back on and i sit here now wondering if you ever meant any of them. if you ever meant anything.

because i was naive,
i was foolish.

i had carved a place in my heart incase you wanted to come back but i should have known better.

a love like yours is only meant to destroy.

i clenched my fist and this goodbye for so long, i choked it down with my tears and held you to sleep while you hiccuped apologies that you’ll be better. but my darling evermore, i cannot be the person you hurt just because you’re hurting. i cannot be that person anymore.

my hands clung to any happiness i could achieve so when you came in swinging, i felt the rush of adrenaline in each and every part of my watery veins—they pumped with yearning and that’s all you ever made of me. a ghost wailing for its own vessel but to only be left hollow in a grave throughout the afterlife brim.

i always screamed too loud at night and i know you learned that you’re the reason why i can’t sleep on my left side for too long. but if it makes one of us feel any better, i cannot drink my coffee with four sugars without remembering how you always did things the same amount of times. never more, never less.

and if it helps you sleep better at night, just know, that i can’t.

my insomnia has been coughing up blood more and more as the days go by. the bedroom gets more suffocating and the comforters have gotten more tight. your name is still the same on my phone but you told me to lose that ages ago. (news flash, wide eyed watercolors never looked good on me.)

we both know the truth of what happened that night but you cannot risk your reputation to save my life.

because after all, only one of us have a soul
and everyone knows it isn’t you.

i’ll never be sober from you.

intoxicated by your fermented words, i know i’ll always drink up your breath as if it is an antidote waiting to be crushed into my lungs.

you’re not allowed to miss me.
not when you had me in between the lines of your palms so deep i could not find where you stopped and i began — to the point i merged within your being — you don’t get to miss the spine shudder i gave you now that you are left hollow and seeking solace elsewhere — craving the one thing you failed to give but loved to take

you cried wolf so much — ripped out far too many hearts to feast on that you forgot to guard your own, the security system only being a thin layer of your pride

you are not allowed to miss me
because once i finish drinking your blood, there will be nothing left of you to dissolve in my shadow.

there’s something wrong with me. there has to be — because how else would i have been able to look into your eyes, touch your soul, and taste the warmth it lacked? how could i stomach you so easily yet still want to purge you up like bad liquor? you never were quite right, but that’s okay. because somehow, that’s just what i liked.

you knock on my door in a way a ghost haunts their crime scene. there’s nothing in your hands but sorrow, yet i race to you anyways. i take your cold trembling limbs and attempt to make them warmer (even when i know the ice is from within.)

you tell me you try to find me in every soul you meet, every daylight your shadow tries to drown in. but darling, i know this time will end up like the last.

you come, and then you go.
i give, and then you take.
i think you will change and you give me the false security that’s enough for me to fall back into the arms i desperately tried to rip off me. i run back to what i was running from.

but baby, please mark my words when i say you will never touch me again and you will continue to fill that void i left because thats only fair after what you gifted me.

i clenched my fist and this goodbye for so long, i choked it down with my tears and held you to sleep while you hiccuped apologies that you’ll be better. but my darling evermore, i cannot be the person you hurt just because you’re hurting. i cannot be that person anymore.

right now you are dissecting a love that may never pass your twisted version of an examination, and that’s okay.

because the next time you come back to my door, i will not be there to open it. next time you come back, i’ll be gone.

i beg of you — romanticize me.

when my bones get heavy, and my eye-bags darken — romanticize the way i still slide my hands into yours and allow myself to melt in your embrace, no matter how much it aches to breathe. no matter how much more i crave from you but cannot do. the pain turns into pleasure and this pleasure is pain.

romanticize the lack of words i attempt to create, to express in my own fashion when all i can do is show through repeated phrases that make me more machine than human.

that is all i am — all i can be
but please romanticize me.

“will you just hold me?… please?”

you hiccuped due to the amount of heaviness you poured out that night, sniffling and begging for me to open my arms to invite you in for a sense of comfort i knew you craved but were always too prideful to ask for. here you were wanting to be cradled like a child, and i answered the call. my arms felt like they were only pushing your broken parts together again for just a moment as you dismantled under my touch — falling limp and cold, face buried with soft whimpers, you were a broken child in a grown man’s body.

you clutched my shirt tightly, knuckled into your fist until they had turned white — you begged for me not to leave you like your dad did. if your own father saw you as unworthy and left, that meant anyone could, right?

you lifted your head to grab my face between your cold shaky palms and pressed your salty tear stained lips onto mine with a delicacy i haven’t felt from you since—i hold onto this memory too much than i probably should.

i hold onto it because i know this was the real you. the real person behind the facade you carried with you for years since LA.

i knew you that night
until the next day i didn’t.

sometimes i wonder if my trauma is still after me. i sit in my bed and try not to count each chipped paint mark on my wall by two’s and how many knots in my stomach that tightened in the last hour, i wonder if my trauma is still alive even after all of those years ago

i fall like the autumn leaves, the same ones that crunched under my shoes when i was thirteen, what do you do when the music finally stops?

you could start it over and replay the same record or you could put in a new one, they say old habits die hard but mine keep showing up at my doorstep like old family coming home for the holidays, except they overstay more of their welcome and never like to be put to bed.

maybe the punch line is that i don’t really know when to stop either, that i don’t like the feeling of my heart not being in my own mouth. every time i get an option to put in a new record, i put the old one back in, even if it’s damaged and has too many faults.

i wonder if my trauma likes to be held, because when i was fourteen, i refused to be touched at all.

and i can’t help but wonder if my trauma ages along with me, because sometimes i still see the same little kid with guns for hands staring right back at me wondering who the hell i am.

i like to think that soon i’ll grow tired of that record and put in a new one, let it play out and have myself enjoy new music for the first time again, and then when it dies, i can give it a proper burial and move on to a bigger label

and maybe i’m capable of doing so right now,

but my trauma likes to sit at the edge of my bed & play that same **** record as a theme song of my wake.

i. he tells me that the iron in his bittersweet blood pumps just for me but the corybantic taste of gun metal on his plump heliotrope lips bears the names of other young lemon balm girls

ii. he runs his tongue over my bloodied lip and bitten flesh as a sugar-coated pristine apology leaves his own because love is only a blood sport for this arcane and the only way he knows how to love is to ****.

iii. he mixes vintage cyanide and coconut water inside of a wine glass while in the driver’s seat of his ‘69 fastback and leaves the blood orange sun rays to seep into my warm undertone skin that is slowly decaying in the passenger’s seat, waiting for his essence to bleach my bloodstream with his carboned deception.

iv. he sews bruised begonias and sullied belledonnas between the crevices of my teeth and leaves me with phantoms that will rip out every cuspid in my mouth; i will rot with the wailing of the weeping woman. he tells me that i am his favorite cryptic artwork throughout the history of sacred retellings.

v. he burns out his corojo cigars onto my ashtray glass skin and watches how it pops, crackles, and melts into my safety pin bones and grow tumor cells within the cracks of my peach mimosa ribcage until i wither to smoke and dust

vi. he sharpens his teeth with a razor blade and licks up the flames of my soul with his serpentine tongue. he will swallow me whole like an acid tab and offer the same one to the next girl with a sharper spine.

vii. my body is his confession booth, wrapped in all of his sins like barbwire. he is absinthe mixed with satiating sunday sins who kisses gospel into my thighs and i fall to my bare knees for a devil with the framework of a god.

don’t say you love me, not when i have the flesh pieces of my own heart stuck between my teeth after you shoved it back into me. when will i learn that i cannot force someone to let me love them? when will i learn that just because i feel the chest-caving need to save someone, doesn’t mean i should?

he plays a sweet symphony—
touches as soft as silk
cherry stained kisses like
remedies to my mouth

he reads my skin like poetry
and whispers about dissolving into our skin—
je t'aimais,
je t'aime,
je t'aimerai.

i can see your silhouette against the lone silver frame of
the island moon. even your veins are paper mache, and there’s an
ache in my heart like you left your fingerprints all over my chest and
kept me from breathing properly. it’s fun to watch: you’re a scraped kneecap.
a kid who won’t take off his training wheels, spring in the desert.

you can see: everything is special in my eyes only if it’s
in relation to you. if i am the moon then you are the stars, lending me your sheen.