remembering something
you learn an age ago
do you just
     have to close your eyes
and wait
        wait for your fingers
              to hit the right keys
in perfect synchrony
   and let the music flow
                    do you just wait
and the chords animate
            is this how love works?
       the long forgotten keys
are hidden in depths
                                  just waiting
for you to close your eyes
                  and let it fly

There isn't much keeping us away,
from each other I mean.
It's not like we are in prison,
there are no chains here.
So why are we not touching?
Why are you there and I'm still
not?
If tomorrow isn't guaranteed,
which I am told true,
I'd rather be walking, thinking, breathing
next to you.  
Let my love be the bridge that your feet trust.
Because there isn't much keeping us away.
All that's between us,
it's only air.

You aren't going to **** yourself tonight because, in one of the

spun sugar fragile sequences of the events in your life, it works

out. There is a place, somewhere amidst star stuff and cosmic

collisions, where you are not the problem daughter or the

biggest disappointment or the most regretted kiss. There is a

place where you sink into a desk in your eight a.m. class and

a boy with bags under his eyes and a hole-y sweater pulled

over his knuckles says, "hi." There is a place where your father

comes back from the war with sand grit in his eyes, blood

under his fingernails and lets you save him.  There is a place

where you live in India, where you aren't afraid to love, where

everything hurts less, where you stopped punishing yourself for

the faults of your parents. You are a girl. Not a dart board or a guilty

verdict or the final, desperate ****** of a sword through

someone's chest. You are made of the same stuff as Marie

Antoinette and Catherine the Great and Elizabeth, and you

can command the winds too. You aren't going to **** yourself

tonight because no one ever asked you about the scars on your

thighs but that doesn't make them nonexistent or unimportant.

You aren't going to **** yourself tonight because you've grown:

stronger in some ways and weaker in others, but you are still

a result of rhapsodies in violet and trees bowed to the sea

and soldiers with wind burn on their cheeks. Tonight, you are

going to wrap your own arms around your own chest and

breathe, swaying silently to no music. You are going to

memorize the sound of silence, and you are going to listen hard

for the even, jagged, pitter patter of your heart. You are going

to thank your body for waging war against itself, you are going

to apologize to your head for bruising your heart. You are going

to feel the roughness of the floor and the vastness of the entire

world and all of the eventualities spread before you. You are

going to remember that this is only one, that atoms and

molecules are flighty, whimsical, prone to selfishness and

longing for the promise of stability. You are going to press your

lips to your own wrists and know, as surely as Anne Boleyn

knew when she walked to the guillotine, that no one can save

you but yourself. You aren't going to **** yourself tonight

because you are not an accident of the multiverse. You are

purposeful and beautiful and young and reckless with your

feelings, but you are not a mistake. Listen to the trembling

of your heartbeat and breathe. You aren't going to **** yourself

tonight.

Don't
fall in love with her.
For you will both crash
and I promise, you will burn, for

She is the girl with too many wounds
the ones even an ocean of your love can't heal.
She is the girl with scars on her knees
because she tried taking leaps of faith far too many times,
waiting for someone to catch her
but they never did.

She is the girl who will never be with you
even if she is holding your hand
and your fingers are wrapped around her shoulders
and her neck is resting on your chest for
she will always be atop an asteroid
trying to catch moon-tears
because she knows that the moon weeps for her.

She is the girl who won't tell you she loves you
even if you tell her a hundred times and look at her
with all the longing you can muster
because she knows how words can be.
Some words
are only said to fill in the empty silence.

She is the girl who is hard to dance with
because she refuses to be led across the dance floor
she's already been led,
many, many times
and she always ended up
with floor burns, scrapes and sprains.

She is the girl with pimples
not enough to cover her face
but enough to let you know how far into the night she stays awake
writing poetry about 'you'
she's written so many poems about 'you'
because her hands won't stop moving
her mind won't stop weaving and I promise,
you wouldn't want her to write about you.

She is the girl with broken, dead bones
the girl who's seen too many deserts
climbed too many mountains
but she never reached the top or
came to the end of the endless stretch of yellow, but
she can tell you a lot about oases.

So before you even think
of falling in love with her, I warn you,
don't.
Do whatever else you want just
don't
fall in love


with me.

Odd boxes,
Patch the room.
Small plates of food
Half eaten, dusted,
With leftover crumbs and papers.
The phone never calls
And shades are drawn for days
Only opening for small, dropping lights
That move in the eves.

I can
Not look at all the photographs I took
Of us
Even though I want to,
Even though they lie
Close to me
With my unmade bed, on the floor
Always falling,
But never to sleep, without you,
Empty.

all of the poems i try to bleed feel incomplete
so that's why i haven't really written anything lately

i guess it's kind of like

sometimes you want something so much that you can feel it boring a hole through your soul
but when you get it you just go numb and your heart won't believe it

i guess.

i don't know.

maybe i just got so used to pessimism
or maybe i just got so used to everything being so dark

maybe i forget hope sometimes because i haven't been looking at Him

either way, i'm trying

not all those who wander are lost.