I have learned that I was not always right because all my life I told myself that I was unworthy and yesterday,  I overheard my friends talking about how I deserve the greatest things in life. I learned that it's not bad putting yourself in front of others. One day, I will live the imagination in my head today.  Sooner or later, someone will bring shivers down my spine and I will awaken the butterflies in their tummy. Someday, I will deserve someone. Someday, someone's going to love me more than I love them and they will give me back the things that I gave the undeserving in the past.

I want to scream

For that gut wrenching feeling
The feeling that is keeping my words stuck in my throat
The feeling that if I say the words my mouth refuses to mutter, I'll be pushed aside

I need to scream
The words I want so desperately to show themself to you just cower in the corner

Words that I want to say, that I want to be heard
...words that I want to be understood
Understood by more than just me

I want to let the words flow but instead I keep them wrapped in a cloth, hidden away from your grasp.

Your smoke has intoxicated me long since my dad stopped driving me to school. I am scorched by the touch of your atmosphere that I will never get used to. I can never take back the money I've spent on ***** ice cream and orange quail eggs. And despite your ridiculous amount of potholes and how every corner of you is corrupted, Manila, you are still my home.

I will forever treasure the nights I've spent walking through your pavement. The lights of you will never fail to fascinate me. How every monuments and art musuems becomes a portal from the past to the future. For all the laughs, tears, annoyance, and anger that I've had with you and the inside jokes that only we know. For the people I've met and will meet inside you. For all the streets I've walked and will walk onto. Despite your lack of snow and intense evidence of climate change,  Manila, I am still and will always be in love with you.

my mouth
it never runs out of words
to say
always spilling, reaping attention

but why
does it run dry
like a wishing well
no words at all leaking out

at the sight
of your face?

You held me in your arms
Watching me grow into myself
Into the person I was supposed to be
I became a piece of you with time
Together we bloomed
You taught me what I needed
to be myself while still
Carrying around some of you
Your wisdom and bad habits
building me from the ground up
I could never understand
Your distance,
but I never doubted you
Every ounce of me misses the old life
Before I only recognized your back,
The life where you loved me,
And you didn't make it look
so easy to walk away.

The wall that seperates our home
Was as thick as the callouses on my fingers,
But I could hear every brush stroke
That he made on his canvas.

With every flick of his wrist,
a new image begins to build.
With every breathe that he took,
breaths of love and passion.

I can see in high quality definition
The looks on the spectator's faces,
As they admire your colors
On the wall beside the colors you once admired.

His fingers was dripping poetic justice and his heart was covered in dictionary pages. I remember how he compared the works of Dickinson to how the stars shine in the night sky. I loved the way his eyes sparkle and his heart becomes frantic whenever he talked about the beauty of literature.

But not once when we were "together" did his eyes twinkled when he talked about me. Not once did he looked at me in fascination like how he looked like when he read The Tale of Two Cities. Not once did the hairs on his neck stood when I showed him the poems I made for him. And not once did he offered a word for me.

Beautiful, fascinating, ethereal.
Those are the words he use to describe literature. Those are also the words he never used to describe me.