i touch you, running my fingers through your hair
   and see god behind my eyelids
the fragile shadow of your lashes onto your cheek
   more beautiful than the moon

how many alternate realities
   we had to sidestep to get to each other
the magnificence in the stars aligning
   cosmic accident springing from a primordial goop

you reached for my hand like a sunday morning
   and held it like a saturday night
next thing i know
   i’m having thoughts of taking in your laughter intravenously

gazing at you like you were the pacific
   and i was desperate to drown
nothing to give
   but my furiously delicate heart

your eyes remind me of tinted windows
   you could see out, but i could never see in
you imagine the way i haven’t changed
   the same as i imagine the ways you have

is it harder to explain what it was like
   to have known you or to have known your absence?
but i found my home in the place
   where my neck met your shoulder

of those three words you said to me
   which one do you think of the most?
the memory fades,
   i’m left hanging on to the ghost of your words

you made each skeleton in your closet feel special
   before they were thrown back in your ***** clothes pile,
the used and forgotten,
   i am only one of them

i saw it coming but at the same time i didn’t
   because i didn’t believe you could possibly be that ******* cruel
a difficult truth to conceptualise
   but i guess some people are only capable of loving the idea of you

it hurt, loving you, but angelica still feels the pain was worth it
   every time your hand touched hers, she was reborn
she may be left for dead in your mistakes
   but she cannot bear to say she ever regrets you

You have been notorious to be the person who others use as a “time filler” — or so you have noticed. You find yourself falling over and over again for people who do not quite feel the same way. Behind their honeyed words and the whole “let me convince you that I mutually like you back” notions and antics, you sporadically begin to believe time and again that maybe – just maybe, things will work out for once. But, as always, it never does. It doesn’t matter if the relation is platonic or romantic, you feel like you’re always at the losing end, your end loving way more than it should. Your soul has so much love to give and you’re starting to think that others can’t quite handle and appreciate that. And you don’t believe you have ever been in a place where you have felt otherwise. Somehow, you manage to let yourself love more. Despite sitting and pretending like you’re okay with it, smearing on a “I don’t give a ****” façade like lipstick, it almost seems like it gives others the excuse to think that their actions of leading you on are okay. But the scary thing is, you have oddly become okay with it somehow. You’ve become immune to expectations being torn down and ripped apart at their seams with the reality that your idea of someone loving you is too optimistic. Therefore, you decide you will continue to love others as hard and as fiercely as you can, but you refuse to let yourself be convinced that things will work out in the end. You tell yourself religiously that everything is temporary. Until someone out there can prove to you that you can be loved more than you have the capacity to love others, you will use your adoration at your utmost. You will allow yourself to be hurt by others who cannot see your worth and your love for them.

awakened by wednesday’s insomniac moon
taking up residence on the living room couch
shrivelled up between the pixels of my laptop screen
incarcerated by twenty-three fifty-nine
chronic irritation fuelling

“****” smeared all over the mind’s spectrum
devout prayer spoken in tongues

the afternoon lunch i never had in the toilet bowl
aftermath curl in my temples
gasoline turmoil in pants and breaths
no light to catch the sorrels of my iris
or brine lined underneath my dark circles

shady anecdotes on the daily
delivered by one’s falsetto voice
keeps this body functioning
humbly grateful source of endearment

quit living tangentially to this massively beautiful life
tie kind words around a stranger’s wrist
till death do us art

my mother a dying supernova
my father a wandering world
but me — a relentless pawn
blooming from apocalyptic dust

papa taught me:
find what scares you and run
don’t walk
sprint, dive headfirst
plummet as fast as you possibly can in its direction

it’s easy to hate yourself when all your love is inside someone else
string together every hour that nearly ruined you
and tell yourself you are not divine
don’t forget the parts of you that you left behind to get here

mama told me:
you are defined by the sequences of your deoxyribonucleic acid
and by the way in which you hold another’s heart
something strange is that —
sometimes people hurt you because they are afraid to hurt you
but that is one gracefully inevitable fact of being human
and that’s what makes it okay

how far does your empathy go?
does it push your organs aside and permeate your skin?
does it leave your body for a new one altogether?
how lucky are we to have been scathed just enough?

we spend our whole lives trying to force the things we love to intersect
but take it as a truth there can be no other way
surround yourself with people you’d be thrilled to get stuck in traffic with
never underestimate the occasional importance of someone’s gentle company
one day you’ll catch yourself listening to someone
like everything they say is an answer to a question you’ve always had