Poets say how beautiful it is
that the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shore
no matter how many times it is sent away

How chasing thunderstorms can make you feel so alive
that sometimes you forget you are in the path of a hurricane.

This is how we fall in love
This is how we fall apart

This is the burning flame
This is the burst balloon

This is saying “I love you”
and only hearing a siren song

This is feeling at home
even with your hands around my neck

Maybe I jumped knowing exactly where I’d fall
Maybe I held your heart so hard it exploded

If we are just two people playing with fire
Why am I the only one who gets burnt?

In sixth grade biology class they taught us
that the average human heart is the same size as a fist.
I didn’t know we would all grow up learning to use it like one.

There is fire in my bones and lightning
in your lungs. When we kiss it’s like
a thunderstorm. Two tectonic plates­
crash against each other and
somewhere in the world starts
quaking. Seismic waves are quicker
than calling. Continental drift is the
earth’s defence mechanism for
commitment. Static electricity, like
miscommunication, is simply friction
in motion. I am crushing sandstorms­
between my teeth, breathing in
hurricanes like oxygen, swallowing
the volcanic ash of survival; to think
we are all made of liquid love and
some will never feel the force of a
tsunami. Sometimes I am stuck
in the eye of a tornado, others I am
spinning in it. Either way, we are a
whirlwind of skin and bone; flesh and
blood; bruises and scars. Laying in
the fresh rubble of our own creative
destruction, I realise, our love is an
oxymoron; a natural disaster; a
phenomenon scientists could only
dream of understanding.

I am an old friend of bruised knees and bathroom floors,
exhaling until the chest is empty and body no longer breathing;
only absence lives here now. Cold stone tiles,
so we meet again: spilling secrets into each other’s mouths
until we see the light of dawn, we whisper
with a hope of being heard, yet fear of being listened to.
For weeks I have been swallowing metaphors like honey,
gulping down apologies for breakfast,
biting my tongue until the taste of forgiveness fills me –
for once my throat is not made of molasses.
There is a reason why our hearts began to curl like fists
and we aimed them at ourselves, because after all,
self-love has always been the most important thing.

Last week I was taught that
no matter how complex an expression may seem
if you multiply it by its conjugate pair
you will always end up with a non-negative real solution.
That is a metaphor for how we have learned to love.

I used to like mathematics, as strange as it may sound,
because memorising the value of pi was
somehow easier than forgetting the notion of you
and I thought maybe comprehending the mechanics of the universe
would lead me one step closer to cracking the combination.

In a world that spins at the rate of 27,900m per minute, a constant can prove tricky to find.
Hence, there is solace to be felt in knowing that even when it is all said and done –
when the final bullet has slipped from our tongues and we are left trembling
upon nothing but the rubble of our own destruction,
two plus three will still be equal to five.

In an attempt to clarify a theory to the class, my teacher analogised
that mathematics is like one big giant jigsaw puzzle:
everything always fits together perfectly in the end
Since then I have learned it is the method without the madness,
the passion for the predictable; it is everything - that love is not.

Not even the greatest mathematician in the world
has been able to measure how much a heart can hold.
There is no algorithm for how to make you come back;
I cannot draw a line graph on the speed at which love left
and even if I could, our gradients would never be the same.

I may have both halves of the bed,
but there is never enough space to fill it with.
If a task takes four hours for ten people to complete
and the same job takes five people twice that time,
how long will it take for a human to feel whole again?

Sometimes I think we are nothing more
than two parallel lines that accidentally crossed paths.

i used to think you were the first thornless rose to ever exist
until i accidentally pricked myself on you
and haven’t stopped bleeding since.

that was the day i learned that
sometimes it’s the beautiful things in life
that can hurt you the most.