The library smells
like ginger and coffee
and books that haven't seen the light of day since they were published

the sour scent of unopened pages
and the bittersweet commercialized coffee
diffuse throughout the building,

procrastination,
this is the smell of procrastination.

the air is swirling,
whipped along by the passers-by
its cool embrace is welcoming
gently blowing through me, onwards

cooling my mind as i brace
for the swell of tests and
tests and
tests

The coffee scent relinquishes,
as well as the task at hand,
and my dorm is calling me

i run my hands
through her
imperfect hairs
wanting to feel
each and every one them
my slender fingers
combe the knots gently
it was soft and smooth
from much use
of hair products
her ginger strans
fell around her beautiful face
pale
paler then what its
supposed to be
skin white as paper
as dark shades
hung below her
long mascara lashes
my eyes overflowed
with tears that were always
never ment to be seen
they
drip
drip
down my face
falling onto the dry crimson
that matted her beautiful hair
the scent so thick
i could feel myself suffocating
in the scent of her own blood

the truth is missing.

a whole town looks

for traces of your

orange red brown hair

after you vanished into

another plane.




the truth is questionable.

you don't know where you are

or how you breathe

or where your flesh and muscle and bones

and wounds have washed away.

was it the other side

or this side?




the truth is stuck.

you push every wall of thin air

and you find that it

is endless.

you shouldn't want to leave.

you can't.

Scarlet-haired maiden. Blood-soaked kitten. Our history once bled from my veins. May the ink from my pen be the last drop to leak from my stitches. I have cursed, I have blasphemed, and for what? You are as blind as ever as to what I am saying. It is as if those crows finally got around to doing my bidding. Scarlet-haired maiden, I am but a Jester to call you so. Calling you a maiden is a folly no less disastrous as calling a Siren a fish. Blood-soaked kitten, you dare call yourself such a familiar? Call your fat self a, "Little" in search of a father figure? Hark… You're but a beast rolling around in lovers' blood. Licking the sweet nectar off your soft and welcoming fur. Had I  not known better I'd reach down to the pits of hell just to pet you. I'd risk your curious claws getting at my loose thread. Sadly… I am but a Jester…I lead you back to our old tree. Our shrine where Gaia herself guarded our love. Where I gave you my heart in the form of an odd pedaled flower. To this day, I dare not to let a white Jasmine flower offend my nostrils. Its sour scent will begrudgingly throw me back to sweet—fleeting—moments. Moments where I had you play the "Loves-Me-Not" game whilst utterly ignoring the warning sign of the very NAME of said game. Moments where I was unaware of the very games you were playing.

She says the best revenge is being able to say “you are gone and I am fine.” That in time all love passes in one door and out another and that there will be another and I look at her and sigh and I can feel her love as it passes me by.
I saw you at the bus stop today. I held my head high and my eyes burned holes into your skull, I felt a certain lull in the self-destructive thoughts which patter around my brain like the September rain. You, are no longer the man who helped me stand. I am my own light house in the storming sea you told me we could whether together but when the weather got too tough you jumped ship and I am now waist deep in my own psychological ****, still spiraling around in circles about all the things you said to me and all the places you’d promised you would be with me.
But in that moment before I turn to get onto the bus I forget about that. I feel your lips part to smile and then you wrap your arms around me and everything is going to be okay. The dragon is sleeping inside me and you are keeping it cradled in your arms I can tell the difference between what helps me and what causes me harm when you tell me I’m beautiful I believe you. And you bring me so much joy I could cry, but I don’t. I don’t even try.
You board the bus the moment melts and I’m back to being incarcerated by my own thoughts. Which are daggers lurking around the dungeons of my subconscious I am digging my nails into my skin I am trying to claw you out of my mind my hair is scattered across the pavement my movement is staggered and my breathing is haggard.
I am barely alive. I am trying to tie you to a tree in my back yard I am trying to teach my tongue to say someone else name next to I love you. I am trying to touch myself in a different way than you did.
I am tying you to the tree with the twine I cut from your brilliant red hair I no longer care what you think of me. I am no longer care if you think of me, I no longer care if anyone thinks of me ever again.
I want to be rinsed in acid and washed in your blood. I want your babies to be named after me I want to stop screaming your name into the night. I want to hold someone else tighter than you ever held me. I want to be angry without being told to keep quiet. I want to be able to trust myself with my own misfortune. I want to be able to tell the difference between good people and bad ones because you tasted like rain water and I was being burnt alive when I met you I miss you, like a dessert misses rain
That is to say that I have adapted to being without you. I have buried everything we built together, like the house we shared and the bed we made love in every night until my body was a well you’d wrung dry I want to be able to say goodbye to you.
I want to be rid of the sin which bound us forever.
I am tying you to the tree in my back yard and I am burying everything we built together.

I have been listening to terrible poems all day because you don’t deserve a good one.
You don’t deserve the spit that hailed the ground from my mouth when I screamed about pride and privilege you do not deserve the ground that I stamped on, hollow breaths escaping a tiny mouth.
You thought you were helping me to get louder but I have lost so many voices since I heard you scream.
You do not deserve to look at me! I am going to be so much better because I left you, you do not deserve to think about the way we used to be, you do not deserve to miss me because if you did I would not be writing this about you.
Instead of miles would be mere meters between us. Our ginger hair would still be tangled in the morning light, your body breathing beneath mine.
If you deserved to love me, you wouldn’t have loved her. You wouldn’t have let her slip her fingers around the cracks in the foundation of our house and hold you.
If you deserved to miss me you wouldn’t have kissed her, you would have told me about her the moment you got home, still dripping with sweat still casting off bets still letting me call you my best friend and lover, you shouldn’t have loved her. You shouldn’t have loved her.
But you did. Dear ginger, did you taste her? Did her sweat linger on your naked body like the shame that should have lead you to tell me. Did the courage it took to take her body wash down with the rain while you walked home. Did you feel any pain? Dear ginger, when you knew we were over – when we felt it like the fog which covered the rental car as we inched closer to home, why did you let me feel so alone? At what point did you not recognize me as the person you swore to protect? Dear ginger, when did I become a stranger, when did I become someone you wanted to hurt? At what point did you start taking dating advice from my abuser?
Dear ginger why didn’t you just leave me? Dear ginger the ***** were always in your court. Except when they were in her mouth. Dear ginger, did you stop her from ******* you off or was that a lie too. I don’t actually know anything about you? I’m sorry am I being unfair? Dear ginger did she run her fingers through your hair? At any point during the two encounters did you maybe think that, while you were inside her. “Huh. Maybe I shouldn’t ******* cheat on my partner!?”
I must be over this, because I’m laughing about it. I must be over this because I’m bringing up good jokes, or maybe that’s just how I cope with a situation as ridiculous as this one. In truth, I’m just done.
I wrote a poem about you called plan bee, about a bumblebee who was too fat to fly. It was wordy, I was nervous because I had never written a poem about someone I loved before. After I read it to you we cried together and made love on the ***** kitchen floor. You made me feel like a small puppy, I was always excited to see you. Even lately I’ve been catching my breath when I met you on the street and when our eyes meet I want to believe that you’re the person I could trust and I’m your little bumble bee. But you don’t deserve to see me, and you don’t deserve to make me happy.

they were all in love with the cartoon eyes and crooked teeth and ginger hair and backwards ball caps
because every time she smiled
they became warmer and warmer until they'd melt, as if the sun was being reborn inside of them.

-*z. vega

It's duller now

I only see you in my suggested friends list... or in tagged posts.
Or in your sister's comment threads.

But I still remember when seeing you on my timeline made me burn up. At first it was ginger, spicy and sweet. Talking to you made me feel like I had the universe in my head; probably because you told me you were studying the string theory and you knew how stars formed.

After a while I didn't feel a burn anymore. I didn't feel anything in my head except empty and I didn't know how to remedy it, except by putting all of myself towards keeping you from feeling the same. I lost myself; you found me, absorbed my strength, and said you had none to give back when I needed it.

The night you tried to **** yourself wasn't ginger, cayenne, or even the weak sting of crushed black pepper. It was pure peppermint oil: molten silver and acidic. I have no other words for it. It hurt almost as bad as when, after weeks of not knowing if you were dead or alive, you texted me.

"So, your cousin is pretty amazing... we've only been talking a week but I think I'm in love with her?"

That was cayenne...
But now I guess I've built up a tolerance.

I love the parts of my body which you loved.
Even more, now that you can no longer touch them.
I can bring myself ecstasy.
I belong to my body.
I am my own lover.