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fray narte Jul 2020
There are nights when I run out of flesh,
of skin and bones
to melt,
to offer,
to fill this glaring pit,
now just a rusting can of worms
There are nights when my soul wraps itself
in silken ribbons and velvet gowns
slipping slowly off this skin:
a striptease for death;
maybe more.

There are nights when my soul
waits,
stills in a corner
and readies itself for Plath to collect.

Get it all out now —
the linen is too short,
the myrrh, too little
for the allusions and all these twisted laments.

This wake is good for just one tragedy.

Get it all out —
the obvious references,
the tributes to another poet,
who killed herself —

get it all out, little girl.

There is no room for two in a coffin
in a world where
Lady Lazarus dies and stays dead.
fray narte Jul 2020
it's almost midnight and i'm drowning in every ******* poem i ever wrote for you — in every ******* poem you'll no longer read.
fray narte Jul 2020
i always dreamed about this —
meeting you again
in our favorite bookstore
and buying our usual authors
and getting paper cuts from ****** novels
just like the old times,
before the words all
fell out of the books.

i always dreamed about this —
neck kisses and i love yous
in a yard we'd call our own,
while the playlists we made
echo from earphones left lying in the grass.

i always dreamed about this —
listening to you recite poems
under the sky and the meteor showers;
then again darling, every prose you say
is my spoken poetry —
is my love sonnet written
for matilde urrutia.

i always dreamed about this —
getting lost once more
in the space between your freckles
and in the outline of your lips
and in the scent of your cologne
mixed with early morning petrichor.

i always dreamed about this —
about this very moment of seeing you again,
in mundane places
and maybe years later,
dreams can come true
somewhere in grocery aisles
and casual talks;
except in my dreams:

you're not wearing a wedding band.
you're not lost in the way that he smiled.

in my dreams,
i'll be the one opening the doors
and carrying the grocery bags,
and you'll not walk away
and leave so soon
while smiling back at him, darling
and while holding his hand.

in my dreams,
i'll still be the one saying i love you.
i love you.
i love you.

and you will still
say it back.
fray narte Jul 2020
i have sealed all the papercuts on my skin;
they have become unmarked,
untended graves
and the willows have long learned
to do their weeping in the dark;
and now,
there can never be enough tears,
never enough mourners
dressed in all the shades of black
to share all this grief
in its most abstract form.

oh, to hear the farewells,
to feel the poems,
to see the wreaths
tossed all over the place
and yet, there can never be enough flowers in the world
to hide these wrists —
all scars and lines for everyone to see
and everyone to read
as if epitaphs to a gravestone;

these wrists —
all scratches from a girl buried by mistake;
the casket, the ground
can only do so much.

oh, such
morbid
thoughts
from such
a morbid
girl;

little one,
you write way too much about death
and his earthly belongings.


maybe one day he'll do the same.
fray narte Jul 2020
Maybe it's all still here, like storms made of bruises and the relics of Carthage under siege. Here, like the laments of a Sunday morning while staring back at tragic eyes. Maybe it's all here, somewhere in this layer of skin beneath the white lines on your wrists. Now the blade just feels like another stranger coming home at 4 a.m.

It was right here in the bones of a girl that once was made of sunlit blunders and curiosities; if you dig deep enough, you might exhume the remains of what she used to be — all purple vervains and the poems she swallowed whole.

Oh, that cruel, cruel joke of delicate things, still withering at the wake of storms such as yourself. Has no one cared enough to tell you that maybe, this isn't what getting better looks like? Maybe you just learned how to seem less messed up.
fray narte Jul 2020
i wanna dive head first
into a map of the night skies
trapped inside our four-walled room;
maybe this is where black holes go to die
and they can all stare back at me —
swallowing a chaos of sobs
and a chaos of all your favorite songs;
regardless, i’ll dive into the night skies,
or what it used to be
and name these stars – the ones that remain anyway,
after you.
after me.
after us;
at least they take a long time to die –
long enough for flowers to droop and fall apart
on weeds and lonely epitaphs.

and dear, i hope heaven is holding you closer than i could ever had;
tell me, did you, like sylvia
write suicide notes and call them poetry?

and god do i hope that heaven is holding you so close,
you forget all of the world’s sadness
you once took for your own.

out here, the calendula falls and
my eyes mourn over petal-covered graves
poems cannot hope to beautify.
and i still wish this is something i can wake up from
fray narte Jul 2020
It's that cliché half-past midnight scene:
you're reading her my poems, under the light of your cigarette, not knowing they were all written for you —


god, the words you read her —
as you kiss her,
they were all written for you.
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