Isn’t it strange
how in this brief exchange
of the creative impulse
we gain
a certain kind of intimacy
with each other
yet we never
smell each other
shake hands
breathe the same air
put up with personal idiosyncrasies
and off-putting voice inflections –
all the things our friends and loved ones have to.

Yet here we occupy hearts and minds
many of our friends and loves do not know
with such closeness, interiority, and connectedness.

What a strange and magnificent gift!

Sweet one, do I still owe you the same dreams?

I've grown kinder and gentler — inward. I've stepped out of my bruises, barefoot and cleansed: a mortal girl out of ***** foam. I've learned to soften the aching. I've learned to let go of things, including who I wasn't meant to be. I am no longer you. I am no longer your failures. Why then, do I still feel the need to chase the distant dreams you wished for? Is it because I still want them somehow — or because I feel like I owe those dreams to someone I no longer am?

peonies in soft decay — petal after petal
i've always looked my worst in the brightest, straying light,
and darling, it knows.

the dying world knows
who comes down to visit. to rot. to stay:

peonies in soft decay —
petal after petal

this kind of softness is an ugly one,
horrific under my thumbs,
a wet, brown, mush.

peonies in soft decay —
and darling, they know, the dying world knows:
i miss having flowers to taint —
petal after petal

after petal.

1
my spine is a bridge that burns —
bones most breakable, like memories of
driftwoods
collected as a kid,
i now feed to a bonfire
of blistered cyclamens.

2
my spine is a bridge
of no certain grandeur
nor history.
it burns away
and falls,
quietly in the night,
like an unknown laborer.

some of us die this way.

3
the reason for this poem
evades me,
but the heart must write of its sorrows
undisclosed to the soul.
they remain to be
unrecognized parts
of a burning town.

4
now, i speak in tongues
unfamiliar to myself.
i write a poem i'm bound to forget.
i stand in the baptism
of a child i do not know.
i do it anyway.

5
i bring her driftwoods
from the water, mourning under
a burning bridge;
soon the last beam falls apart
and i fall apart
in a forgettably graceless light
this: a sorrow with no name,
i write it anyway.

this: a sorrow undisclosed.
i tell it anyway.

this: a sorrow unrecognized.
i feel it anyway.

the dusk wastes its pity on me. in its muted retiring lights, i have learned a terrible habit of forcing poems out of my mouth,
when maybe all i wanna do is be as quiet as the wounds nesting inside my head.

pandora opens her chest at midnight:
it is a box left out in the rain,
a wound unstitched in despair for october,
a small voice hushed by forlorn hours.

and dead gods forget so easily,
but
pandora still opens her chest at midnight
and the walls huddle to look at an ugly wound
left open to bleed all over
dusty pink cosmos flowers.
and drapes huddle, too,
to look at a nest of sorrows creeping about,
as though a wake, a vigil,
a somber watch that only ends
with all of my bones breaking.

but dead gods forget so easily,
and dead girls forget so easily,
and i forget so easily
all the aching hours that had kissed my skin
and their graceless, moonlit pull,
and i am left to lie
languishing on soft, breakable spots.

and so pandora closes her chest:
a box to never be opened, a vault behind a frame.
a flash of stray light on a wound sealed shut. safe. secure.
there is no space for conspicuous melancholies.
there is no space for anything —
there is no space for hope.

and the gods forget so easily.

Eyes. Heartbreak is her sunlit memory barely held by a wooden clothespin. It hangs and glares before your eyes, mocking as it fades into an empty filmstrip. Heartbreak is a lost soul left to perish in her ghost-town, and warmer sunsets are lifetimes away. A wonderwall left standing, pinned polaroids, desperate scratches. You had fought hard and long, for this, but homes are made for breaking and crumbling and leaving, especially in the losing side.

Mouth. Heartbreak is a paper-tag of a goodbye caught in her lips. It is a metaphor that melts at the soft space under your tongue, a certain bittersweet taste made for drowning with a cold lager, a stranger’s whispers, and the perils of his unfiltered cigarette kiss. Heartbreak is taming a manic scream into a delicate, defeated sigh, out of sync with the way she breathed. But then sighing still hurts, and breathing still hurts because you’re alive – you’re so ******* alive for this unbuffered pain.

Chest. Heartbreak is begging your chest not to break amid a listzomaniac rush. Heartbreak is a prosaic throbbing, a treacherous ***** stuck in your ribs, begging to be held like it doesn’t hurt. Heartbreak is a site of buried lavender lithiums, asking for a eulogy; but silence is equally as oppressive. It is your body betraying you, like a city undone by its smokes. It is a quiet word – not a poem, because poems are beautiful despite the pain, and this isn’t. This isn’t.

Hands. Heartbreak is your shaky hand flipping through the last three pages of a tragedy — a heroine dies, a stray star falls, a maiden leaves on a horse-drawn carriage. There is no changing of the ending. Heartbreak is reaching for the empty space in bed, leaving your fingers in technicolored bruises. How can emptiness break one’s bones? Heartbreak is scrubbing your skin dry, raw, and untouchable where she once laid her kisses. Heartbreak is your nails digging through her letters in utter despair — for invisible ink, a promise in the postscript, an estranged lover in familiar flesh, only to find torn sheets, spilled wine, and finality.

Legs. Heartbreak is coming home to ***** laundry all over these cold, wistful floors. Heartbreak is walking in hushed tiptoes only to trip and fall down a memory lane – a kaleidoscope of all the wounds that can possibly hurt. It is catching an empty train to somewhere unloving her is possible – doable. Heartbreak is teaching your legs to run away from the chaos of her naked skin, and not to fall at her feet. But still, you fall and you fall and you break what’s left of your bones chasing after something that’s already gone – long before it has said goodbye. So turn your back and hold your heart — it breaks harder, louder, and worse before it settles down and sits as quiet aching: a forgotten filmstrip, a soundless breath, a calm poem, a serene night.