i've always loved you one way or another. i break out of your ribs only to bury myself back in. i've always loved you one way after the other. everything else is a fleeting state — cruel, fluid transience leading me back to you.

some ghosts you just miss, darling — some ghosts, you'd die just to see again.

the weight of your breaths is burning its way inside my skin. this is a catastrophe we're in now, darling, and i resemble all of your crestfallen asters, dried and dusty in your altar — now caught in a forest fire. this is a catastrophe we're in now but heathens like me don't burn down, and i have loved you with such fatality i didn't once possess. i have loved you like stray dust in lilac vapors. i have loved you, like stray wind in a firestorm.

this is the calm we're in now darling — and i have loved you to the point of no return.

my wasting bones are unsettled by kisses. how your lips graze my paper skin and i am an origami crane — catching fire in waking sunlight. watch me love you terribly. kindly. fatally. watch all of my shadows burn bright for you, my darling, into the sweetest, sun-soaked surrender.

1
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history
and what remains of its stardust.
my sorrows expand with it; my vastness grows wider,
deeper by the day to accommodate
an uninvited houseguest.

2
i fear the act of going through my bones
like a bundle of endless, wistful letters;
some for burning.
some for throwing away.
some for breaking through
my ashen skin.

how can i be both limited and boundless —
it is no magic — just mundanely human.
the thought descends like poison eating at my backbone
until i am no more than a bygone, spineless caryatid.

3
yet again i take down the cosmos,
pick it apart
and in my hands, manage to turn it
into something distastefully prosaic —
turn it into a disassembled being.

all this wordless sadness has made me ancient. alien. unidentified.

4
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history;
i have long stopped trying to make any sense to myself and
there is no greater joy
than to be a perplexity.

amid it all, i tiptoe back and forth
between the ice-thin parts of celestine silence
and the static ringing of incomprehensible poetry.

the ground where i stand on breaks;
i float with no direction.

5
i am the space expanding endlessly; i grow wider and deeper
to make room for vaster sorrows —
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i tear it all down. tear it all quietly. inward. once and for all.
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i implode in tragic,
breath-taking cosmic colors.

so you sew your melancholy shut –
pour your father’s ***
on the stitches
like you always do

i turn my back and bend over –
ache descending my backbone
where your kisses used to rest;
it recoils in instinct

as i keep on digging for the same mistakes
on skinfolds and chromatic bruises
and thin walls where i hung
my tendency to ache
scrubbed out of me like dead skin,
as i lie, washed, stripped, and tender
in these soft, celestine sheets;
i pepper bits and pieces of myself
to diffuse the hurting

but my pain is blinded;
yours, all-seeing
as i draw my three of swords
from my deepest deck of cards
but there’s already an epigraph
of your name on my clavicles
and you see how your all-elysian, moon-drenched lover
is all tainted, all this time,
and darling, how alive you felt
when you fell in love with this disaster
but the truth is staying in love
will always be your death.

and what i know to be deathless love
is now lost in our ghastly lights
and how we danced with liquid fire
long enough to feel it burn
but all roads lead to rome, darling –
all roads lead to ruin
and all the letters i wrote you are banners
burning in its cathedrals
as roman gods watched us
pick our limbs apart.

and do you think
we can love each other through this,
touch our way out,
love our way out of these

wars we waged —
burning houses,
mess we made
kisses dead in our stately wake
this love — this feeling
spilling like ether, leaving
squandered poems
all over the place.
had you known it all along
had you walked away?

but darling how alive you felt —
how alive we felt in love
but  one day you’ll call it crucifixion
and i’ll call it back  my death.

and we fall like sacred dust,
a bedlam of debris.
and i draw my three of swords:
dead-cold steel
and paper-soft sorrows.


do you think we have it in us to love each other out of this?

i let go of myself mid-air,
suspended like a plastered sun goddess —
i long to be smaller. younger. incorporeal
but grief is royal mantle dragged in the mud,
draped on my shoulders, down to my limbs:
like a pair of sunbeams gone astray
and the sun has long left without
so much as a sorry letter.

still, i feel its hands
creeping to the parts of my lungs left untouched.
its glare spreads like rust,
telltale in the daylight glow.

soon, i will implode from all this alien warmth
like a colony of bats, a revolution for the dusk.
soon, the sky will recognize this ancient sadness
throbbing inside a mortal body
like a rejected ***** wanting to escape.

i let go of myself mid-air:
vivid and ugly under the softest parts of sunlight –
all dying in the dusk in slowest motion;
it washes over me. anoints. screams out in mourning
screams out ‘no’.

but i have taken my flights and fall.


i let go of myself mid-air.

oh how you turn the love as chaotic as ours into something so comforting; i no longer want to call it violent. storm-like. visceral. i want nothing but warm hands and ether kisses, withering like the fire-lit buttercups on your night stand. i want nothing more than to talk to you with a mouthful of sunsets. i want nothing more than the calm quiet nights, with no space between us, our skin aglow under lilac fairy lights. i want this new-found state of quiet grace. i want to be draped in your presence: a girl who never stays too long in a crowded city. a constant stranger. a new-found belief where good things end up and finally fall into place.

at last — something our hearts are cut out for.

today, demeter is nothing but
a bewildered ghost in a haunted meadow,
skinning flowers as they weep:
they're neatly lined as in an execution,
the creek, a boneyard,
a lair of sorrows for her dazed *******.

today, the sun desperately combs
through tree branches
for an abandoned nest of grief
but its hands just stray too far
and poke at a meadow's wound —
nails cutting through graying skin.

this is a poem written by a bystander.
this is a poem written by a witness.
this is a poem written by the victim.
the world blurs its lines today
and demeter is nothing
but a forgotten ghost
in a town painted new.