Wish i am strong enough by this time.
Wish i had the courage to face him later.
Wish that i could hug him tight by the time that i saw him.
Wish i could kiss him again.
Wish i could reach out and grab him and feel his arms around me again.
Wish i could share another day with him and share the laughter again.
Wish i can smell his armpit and feet.
Wish i could say i love him endlessly.
Wish i am not craving for him anymore.
Wish i am not crying at night wanting him to just appear in front of me.
Wish i am not crying on the bathroom floor begging God to bring him back.
Wish that i had him not only in my dreams so that i would not want sleep so much cos i know that dream is the simplest way for me to feel him again.
Wish the gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart game is not that strong.
Wish i didn't wished these last Wednesday wishes.

gone \’gôn also ‘gan\

adjective
no longer existing: no longer at a place; departed or lost.

When asked about my favorite memory, I can recall nothing. All that comes into mind is a blur of what has once been, of what things were, right before everything ceased to exist. I remember the shadow of your smile, the echo of your voice, and the silhouette of your embrace. It was the simplest of things, and also the insignificant ones at that, that seems to be tattooed on my mind. Nothing can quite compare to the feel of your lips pressed against mine, to the touch of your hands igniting my body. When it comes to you, all else fades into the background: my fears of commitment, of being not enough.

However, none of it matters now, anyway. Not when all is lost; not when everything is all a little too late. So if one would ask why I do not consider these fragments of memories as my favorite, the answer is quite simple. A favorite memory should be something that could bring you rapture in reminiscing. How could nostalgias centered with you become my favorite if all they do is haunt me of a love lost and another round of “what could have been”?
Once in every dream my brain could come up with, amidst the constant troubling of my nightmares to sleep, I get visions of us holding hand in hand with everyone right there to see. I dream of you singing me to sleep, enveloping me in your warmth all through the night. But this wistful thinking burns all hopes like how a piece of the sun could burn like a coin in my hand. No more, darling, we could not go back to the way it was, no more.

Like a missing piece in a puzzle, I know it is more than a mystery, an enigma, why I vanished suddenly. Are you even still waiting for me? Are you still there pining for my return? If yes, then good for me that I have someone like you. If no, then just know that I completely understand. But whatever the answer may be, I know you deserve an answer. The lies I reasoned with for leaving are not entirely tell-tales. But I did lie, by omission, of denying you the truth of why I wanted out.

As I write this letter to you, I want you to think of me with the sun’s rays illuminating my dark locks. Envision me in a meadow by the hill, with the sun setting behind my back, the pen in my hand with you as the subject of my afternoon daydream. But in this reverie, I do not think of how it feels to be loved by you again neither how it soothes my insides to hear your voice once more. Instead, in this contemplation, I gather all the courage to make myself vulnerable to someone, to entrust a portion of my soul to the hands of another.

I remember how you once asked me, “Will you stay with me no matter what?” You took my lack of answer as an affirmation and kissed me on the forehead instead as we looked at the stars lighting up the night sky. There was a lot of everything that I would have wanted to say but nothing came out of my mouth through every attempt. I wanted to tell you that I could not, that no matter how much I would have wanted that to happen, it would be more than unfair to you if I stayed. No, if you stayed with me.

Do you remember how I told you how my grandfather switched up names of his own daughters? Do you remember the story of how my aunt mistook her past lover to be her husband? You see, love, a year or two from now, I might become them. I have been diagnosed with a terminal memory loss, the Alzheimer’s disease as they would call it, and only time then could dictate the deadline of every single memory I have.

Leaving, as they say, was always a coward’s way out. But is not it dauntless how I braved living without my lifeline, living my life without you? I did not mean to be selfish, dear, but cannot you see how I am being selfless in letting you go? To set you free of me is to protect you from anymore hurt that this condition of mine would bring you. The knowledge of me leaving you for an unknown reason is a more tolerable pain than the reality of me forgetting you in the long run.

“Where were you then?” I was at the far distance looking at you exist without me in the picture. “Who else was there?” No one but your silhouette haunting me every minute. “Saying what?” That it was a mistake to abandon you.

Mourn no more for our lost love, dear. Mourn no more for the longing of what we once had and the regrets of what we could have had. As my every memory of you slowly wanes, always remember how hard I held on to them, the hardest that my brain could ever allow. Sometimes it is bliss to pretend that memory loss happens since the brain gives way for the heart to store the collection of moments we have, that my mind flushes you out to store you inside the core of my body.
But most of all, darling, the pain of leaving is endurable than the unbearable pain of seeing you suffer all because of me, than the inevitable pain of taking one glimpse on the masked agony on your face every single time I would ask “Who are you?” It would hurt to look at your beautiful face with me unable to know even just your name. You see, love, to be gone from your life is far more tolerable than to exist day by day with you in my life slowly vanishing into dust. Always, for always it would only be you. Even after all of my memories plummet into the hollow chasm and they are all gone, gone, just gone.


(k.p.)

My doctor told me to find a more healthy way to release my stress.
She said that taking two hours to fall asleep every night was rather unhealthy.
So, she told me to come home and to write about the things that relax me.
Here we are.

Every day a thousand things run through my mind. I can't breathe because school sits on my shoulders. My job crushes me slowly and my family physically causes me pain. But through so many foggy images I can see you through them all.
I can reach out and almost touch you even when I am alone in my room and I cannot get up because the panic has literally crushed me.
You are there in the simplest way.
The few moments in my life when I think the only way out is to let the weight of the world crush me entirely I can feel you.
The times that everything is in pieces and I am vulnerable and on the floor of my bedroom sobbing, you happen to walk in.
You physically pick me up and you carry me to safety.
A bath and you will bathe me and you will hold me and I will collapse and you will support me.
You carry me to my bed and put on a vinyl and a candle and you clean my room because it being ***** stresses me out.
You turn the lights off and the fans on and you consume me in your warmth.
You kiss the demons away and you strip off the suffocating clothing on me.
You make love to me and you wipe away terrible tears and you drench me in your love.
The seconds become minutes and minutes are now hours and you spend what is almost days with me in my bed wrapping your body around mine.
I cannot breathe still but now it is the best kind of breathlessness. The kind that happens when you see heaven in the eyes of a human and your life is paused while you try to remember how it all happened.
I am crushed still but now with the weight of your love.
But there is no pain. None. Only the most beautiful feeling my small body has ever felt.
And in the moments of bedroom bliss I am free. I am free of those things that eat at me and those thoughts that stress me to tears.
With you I am free.

A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry

To you, my aunt, who would explore
The literary Chankley Bore,
The paths are hard, for you are not
A literary Hottentot
But just a kind and cultured dame
Who knows not Eliot (to her shame).
Fie on you, aunt, that you should see
No genius in David G.,
No elemental form and sound
In T.S.E. and Ezra Pound.
Fie on you, aunt! I'll show you how
To elevate your middle brow,
And how to scale and see the sights
From modernist Parnassian heights.

First buy a hat, no Paris model
But one the Swiss wear when they yodel,
A bowler thing with one or two
Feathers to conceal the view;
And then in sandals walk the street
(All modern painters use their feet
For painting, on their canvas strips,
Their wives or mothers, minus hips).

Perhaps it would be best if you
Created something very new,
A ***** novel done in Erse
Or written backwards in Welsh verse,
Or paintings on the backs of vests,
Or Sanskrit psalms on lepers' chests.
But if this proved imposs-i-ble
Perhaps it would be just as well,
For you could then write what you please,
And modern verse is done with ease.

Do not forget that 'limpet' rhymes
With 'strumpet' in these troubled times,
And commas are the worst of crimes;
Few understand the works of Cummings,
And few James Joyce's mental slummings,
And few young Auden's coded chatter;
But then it is the few that matter.
Never be lucid, never state,
If you would be regarded great,
The simplest thought or sentiment,
(For thought, we know, is decadent);
Never omit such vital words
As belly, genitals and -----,
For these are things that play a part
(And what a part) in all good art.
Remember this: each rose is wormy,
And every lovely woman's germy;
Remember this: that love depends
On how the Gallic letter bends;
Remember, too, that life is hell
And even heaven has a smell
Of putrefying angels who
Make deadly whoopee in the blue.
These things remembered, what can stop
A poet going to the top?

A final word: before you start
The convulsions of your art,
Remove your brains, take out your heart;
Minus these curses, you can be
A genius like David G.

Take courage, aunt, and send your stuff
To Geoffrey Grigson with my luff,
And may I yet live to admire
How well your poems light the fire.