1500 seconds after, I tripped over my own boots.
I fell onto the sidewalk and scraped my knee,
a dusty indigo mark.
today i might’ve made a friend;
she asked to share my notes and I gave her the date.
I forced my arm into the closing train doors
because i was taught to fight for what you need.
I let my words flow and ebb and my thoughts consume me,
follow my veins up my pallid legs through my fingertips,
and let them sink me.
because you taught me to journal.

the last time I wrote my hair was shorter,
copper, colourful and vivid.
I wait because that’s what I was taught to do;
you bleed until what you crave consumes you.
until your head is afflicted by the fervid, dark feelings.
when I crawl around my every day, I find pieces of you.
in plantain chips and Plato.
in wool coats and white coffee mugs.
it's impossible to tear myself from you.

Deep in the sea,
You are my book--
Pages living within my soul--
Sweet honey letters battering against my heart.
It took blank pages, empty silences;
You were the one that took the longest to write.
Because you, and only you, are the scholar.
The chains in the sea pulling at my heart,
Words filled with unfaltering reason.
Reason that melts into silence.
Honey.

The page you tore out; it cannot be forgotten.
It lives inside of my ribcage.

Your love--or your lack of it--is sending me into a spiral.
One minute you are here, alive and ardent,
The next, you are my ghost.
You are the wave that is drowning me,
The box that is suffocating me,
The sun that is blinding me.
We have danced around this for so long:
The empty souls are coming--
But we are still standing here.
Perfect.
Imperfect.
Racing inevitably towards the end.

Please don’t let me go.

You are all of the blistering colours swirling in my head;
The indigo waves and the copper sunrise,
You are the white light that refracts and sends
All of your miraculous colours to my dark corners.

Relatively;
They’re traced back to your hand.
Where the lakes meet the palatial forests,
Ensconced by a foreign land,
Ink stains, summer ice cream, soccer matches.
They spell what raised you from the ground.

Farther;
They pull you to the motherland.
Whispering to you in unfamiliar characters,
On a train across the vast verdant terrain,
Reliving the arduous lives of your predecessors.

You are a product of cold animosity and two rivals.

She walks;
A single sole scuffing the solid earth,
A pebble thrown into empty silence,
The night embracing the wisps of her hair,
Down to her frigid fingertips.
She screams;
An empty howl
As constant as the wind,
Waiting for another soul to entwine with.
She reaches out:
Honey,
Just sit down
And
Bleed.

You share my blood, yet for so long
We never quite saw eye to eye.
You still grasped my hand and held it.
You never let go.
A twin, I suppose, is what you are.
A mirror image of me, a dream-self.
In a richer life. One full of lustrous adventures.
Marching down a cobblestone street;
Sipping sweet secrets in a foreign land;
Fighting the enemy, calling out in triumph.
Perhaps you are a lesson, maybe a vision.
One that beckons me to go further.
Calls to keep growing. Becoming.
For four fervent years
We have shared our hearts, every fiber of our soul
Has bled into each others veins.
And when the day comes, please know.

You’re the only one I need.
Running from the late night doubts,
You’re the arms I crave.
You;
A mellow, present cure
For my tentative, diamond heart.
Tell me you love me
Then stay.
Hold me, hear me, have me,
Then leave.
Tell me you love me and run.
Brush off your hands and hold me,
So I don’t run.
So I can’t hide.
Force me
To make up my mind,
To stay or break or mask,
To destroy or to flourish.
Hold my hand and run.
With me.
Home.

I never told you I would leave.
Us;
In an airplane over Russia;
Our feet slipping into skates too small;
Sipping a distinctive type of chai.
You know me too familiar.
When I shiver, so do you.
We speak in our own language,
One in which the light bends
From your sapphire eyes;
One in which we are twins.
We burn together.

in summer.
To be free.

<I love you in every transatlantic mile.>

i.
I imagine the lemon sun rays
Beaming on the fronts of my eyelids;
An illusion, an iridescent glow
Forms around my wandering mind.

Ii.
The careless waves floated in
An orange peculiar pattern.
I reach;
Calling the name of my prospect.

Iii.
A hollow echo, the end of a passage
revealed in the saturated aura;
Crimson tangerine amber cobalt indigo
bleeding into a soft ivory

Iv.
The days soon return their structure
Beckoning my name in the breeze
Opening my eyes from the somber dusk,
Unlocking the ebullience from the earth.

In summer;
A fever for the world.
A billion scarred shoes,
carry me over the sapphire waters.
Whisper through my hair, tell me I’m home.
Tell me through and through i belong to you.
Like a needle, I am thread;
Latching to you, your direction, your ways.
Write to me in different languages,
Beckon me to the cobblestone tower,
Up the verdant hills,
Among the gritty powdered paths.
As i overlook the cerulean waters,
I’ll spot the trifling sailboats,
Like ripples in a cup of tea.
Too vast for a photograph,
Too surreal for words.

A wayward, willowy girl.
An anomalous, alluring world.

We don’t have a name,
And our love isn’t something they write about.
I watch you scrawl some stains on a paper
As you tell me to go,
But I can’t.
I try to leave, but my molten feet stick to the floor.
The space between us is different from the others.
Am I a scribble in your black notebook?
Because your name is written countlessly,
In elegant, clear penmanship in mine.
But we aren’t that obvious and clear.
Our names aren’t printed on the latest newspaper,
To read all about.
Our hands don’t rush together in unison
When we walk down the sidewalk.
We survive through secrets,
Sending letters through underground cities.
We dance around the words of others,
As my mouth slowly meets yours.
We are a garden that ceased to exist,
But instead reversed..
You are a mystery,
Not in the typical manner.
You are not the one you can solve again and again;
But one that puzzles me every time.
You find me at midnight,
My hands are shaking, as I hold you, eyes bright.
Your palms are cold, thawed by the heat of your breath
And we sit.
Your peculiar eyes dazzle me.
It’s not an emerald green,
But the kind of green in a forest
Among an earl gray coast.
Nostalgic, but warm.
Rainy, but bright.
We are tenacious as one.
Through you I’ve lived a thousand lives;
Sipping pink lemonade in a rainy diner,
Standing on the Oregon coast,
The navy ocean biting at our feet and
Inviting us for an icy swim,
Chasing you down the Champs-Elysses,
Watching your eyes turn into London skies.
I’ve seen every bitter moment of your life,
From the bruises on your thighs,
To the thoughts you try so hard to bury away.
I love you from the faded buttons of your flannel
To the burning tips of your hair.

Please let us exist as one.

I was marching down the crowded avenue
When I realized my hair was covered in kerosene.

Eyes flash; memories appear.
Bitter lips and kisses just covered in lies.
I was as stainless as the flowers in my hair;
The ones you picked from the garden.
I was as passionate as the ocean;
Always coming back to kiss the shore.
A sweet love, a love as wonderful and
As vibrant as the floral perfume around my neck.
The same one that gave me a rash.

Once we held flashlights, escaping into
The dark and hollow night alone.
Two hearts ignited on fire.
But flashlights always run out of battery,
Right?
I breathe in the salty ocean air.
I detect traces of you.
A ratted baseball glove.
Faded mint soap.
Stale potato chips; always crushed.

Nights of March play over and over;
Leaving and leaving and lying.
You talk of
Nightmares of dead flowers, wasted love.
Dissolving all bonds of emotion.
All I can see are flames.

You held the knife,
But I was destined to burn.
I was holding the matches all along.

I want to wake up to a new sunrise every day.
Let me taste a culture, let it be bittersweet on my lips,
As new terrains scar the soles of my boots.
I want a map with faded, ravished, old ink,
To guide me where to go, where to be, who to be.
Let it erase my regrets, let it create a new person.
All the past is gone; here’s to new beginnings.
I want  magnificent, sweeping adventures with my eyes open,
Waking to unfamiliar words, an unfamiliar life.
Give me restless cities, petite villages, rocky terrains.
As long as I am everywhere, my eyes will not sleep.

It’s 4am,
Darkness engulfs my room
And my night light gives a ghostly glow.
Alone, in the darkness, I lie awake.
My thoughts scatter around the room.
Beams of moonlight fall
Like sun through a cloudy day.
The universe stands still,
But time is a train that can’t be stopped.
It’s 4am,
Crystal tears fall from my glass eyes.
And you’re just lying awake.
Maybe the silence is better,
When nobody else is around.
I am alone, a lonely cup of tea.
And you seem to be across the world.
I am alone, and I wish you were here.
It’s 4am,
And it starts to rain.
Drops patter on the window,
Drown the outside world.
I am stuck inside, enclosed in a box.
And I wonder,
Do you hear the rain too?

If I were to write your name my hand would shake,
So bad the ink from my pen would stain the paper.
Your soft voice burns my ears
A sultry cup of tea that ravishes my throat.
Your stale perfume makes me cringe,
But yet fills the fragmented pieces you broke.
Your words are endearing, captivating, sweet
But are dripping with mystery, and give me unease.
Am I apprehensive, invidious?
I see the dusk forest in your eyes,
Like your passion for the world, and every plant you see.
You say green is your favourite. It fits you.
Clean, organic, and environmental.
Perfect.
Imperfect.
As soon as I met you I could feel myself falling
Deep in my bones, running through my veins.
And as long as I live, I can never tell you that
I will love you longer than my heartbeat.
You tell me that we are one person,
But this time I feel we are two.

I am paperwhite,
                a delicate bird,
                                  thrashing and ensnared.
Paperwhite,
             and bones of feathers;
                                  light and airy.

I fly,
         fly away in the ceaseless night sky.
Snowflakes stick to my face,
                                  my eyelids,
                                               my garments;
That are knit together too big on my frame, draping over
My winged shoulders and shielding me,
like a wall
Protecting a delicate feather from windy skies.
Running, fleeing.
                             Gasping, dying.
Blood starts flowing,
                                and rushes down my forehead,
Thin, the kind of flow that won’t stop.
It flows over my eyes,
                                       down my chiseled face
And pools in my collarbones creating a lake.
I look into the distance;
                                         staring back at me are ashen eyes.
I am homesick for somewhere I’ve never been.
Longing, longing,
                               flying, running.
Running home,
                                              running far.
Reaching with open arms,
                                        Reaching closer.
Reaching out,  
                          breaking the cage keeping me.
A mucky ocean of dirt and sediment,
Clears into an open water,
                                      a clear oasis,
                                                          a path.
Folded like paper, flying like a bird.