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.

Does it make you happy that someone just can't wash the memory of you out of their head? Because I told myself I would dissolve your essence in my system. I told myself I wouldn't waste a drop of ink or a single letter for someone I know isn't coming back.

The thought of you is toxic. Every cell in my body is yearning for you to haunt me again. And here I am, writing a poem that you will never, ever, read. I don't even know if you know about this account. Hell, I don't even know if you know I still make poems. I told myself I'd stop writing about you. But every emotion that  triggers a wave of poetry throughout my body is caused by you.

And no matter how much it hurts to do nothing but hope your name appears on my phone again, there is no place in this world I'd rather be than to wait here for you.

i miss pieces of you that you never let me see,
the parts that you buried inside your graveyard chest
all bone and lost feelings and mourning

your mouth tastes like ash, though you swear you never lit a cigarette
i am foolish enough to go grave robbing
in the absence of your love,
in the no man's land plagued with pictures of us

in the valley of despair and up the mountain of missing you
tumultuous thunder claps that bring angels to their knees,
death laughing every time I look at you
and you turn the other way

the funeral procession is long over but i cannot get my feet
to stop dragging
i cannot look up from the ground we are buried in

it's as if when your love died, i died of a collapsed lung,
of suffocating under the weight of what we could have been
but never were
they took me to the hospital but no doctor could figure out what was wrong with me
neither could i.

the collapsing in my chest, the way i gripped the sterile sheets and said
god take me home,
god take me to him,
god if you exist make him love me again

god if you exist raise me like lazarus and make him come running to me

the dizziness, the flowers they laid  in my ribcage, the graves that look the same

god, if you exist, take me home