I.
There lies the vast longing to be engulfed in suspension,
to lose one’s orientation in search of the true unknown
for salt waves that lick the skin clean and blunt
the sleek lines of the face.
It takes a while to ebb a whiteness into the hardness of time.
II.
It is said that in flames,
the body forgets it is vertical on a stake
and the head is anywhere but above the shoulders;
that in cleansing with fire the skin turns red
then, in an instant, chars to black.
III.
They say there are two ways to cleanse oneself:
while white is the color of salt-dried purity,
black is the color of fiery clean.
In the end, after the fire brittles our bones,
all we throw into the sea is gray dust.

It’s the hollow sound of a toast to fill the silence of unaddressed questions,
the celebratory clanging of glass on glass
ringing from assumptions based on past experiences and theories
     from synapses of protagonists or all
that is mystical; a god or a God
          for the rhetoric of bad days; the precatory shoulda, woulda, coulda’s
   you can count with all digits and the humdrums,
the lalala’s to songs with lines you can never remember.

It is to fill in, with pencil, the
blanks of unclear intentions, capricious endings,
     the what comes after the highest number, tentative now, for it is a trick question,
the true stories of Bermuda Triangles and Altantises,
          for the ones Amelia kissed goodbye and all that is brief,
               promises neither broken nor kept;
     some, hypotheses for what happens after waiting.

               It is the makeshift certainty ascertained the day he left
          all these unfinished, unanswered, incomplete… things. The sure of it
     invented by staking everything in a nebulous something,
a nebulous anything that will have to do, like cotton patches
     on satin dresses or saints for hopeless causes.
               It was the invention to quench the constant
          need to know, to fill the in-between start to end
       for all that we can not stop. A made-up map by pirates below ten
for every time we must set destinations beyond unchartered unknowns;
                     a make-believe place holder to hold us to the relief
          we get from closure when
                  the universe gives us none.

It is the lemniscate, the amen,
the St. Jude we assign to our altars
until we find actual satin or the aviatrix herself,
          or surrender everything in the spirit of faith
                    or believe
          that not all things unfound are lost.

A RE-CYCLED boyfriend, with love like new
a re-cycled superhero fell from
re-cycled bedtime stories and re-cycled songs.
(I once sat next to an ex-lover on the train.)
On re-cycled cab seats and
second-hand dreams, to second-rate alibis
using re-cycled, bated, breathing breath,
the smell of re-cycled furniture
the musk, the dust
the re-cycled mother,
some second-hand toys for orphans of re-cycled mothers,
their re-cycled apartments touched by
re-cycled hands that hold
orphans and the world that is full of these things,
these unwanted things.
(No matter where you sit, it’ll always be next to an ex-lover.)
So we re-cycle, and then we’re like new again.

One of these days I will be standing on your porch,
Facing a you with one of these babies in hand.
On that day, it will be my nape you see last
As by then you will have learned
Not to look into my eyes.

The memory you will salvage as you close the door of our tryst won’t be
         that time we bought the tube at a gas station with some Dr. Pepper,
Nor the forever we disproved in the name of circumstance,
                    Nor the never-ending ending,
               the looking like the bad guy, and the
          what-always-happens.

No -
what you’ll remember most with that tube of what-used-to-be chapstick
          Is the feeling of pretty pink petrolatum over the seams of your lips,
               The every time you didn’t pop the slippery white cap off,
                    The 23 flavors of us and then one,
               And the trembling, the ever so slightly and off-key apologetic,
          At the lingering taste of a something you yourself didn’t finish.

I dream about them sometimes.

A fold for an eyelash, crooked tooth, white hair;
A beak for a fingertip, heart-shaped mole, rough elbow;
A wing for an expression, idea, stifled laugh;
A neck for a spasm, brutally honest letter, sleeping breath.

I hold tightly to my chest the first of the two paper cranes [Loss and Love, respectively]. It calls back to her brothers and sisters at (our) home. At times, the sound would be so painful, I would banish it to the farthest recesses of my room, between book and shirt, away from light and butterflies.
But her cage is an illusion.
Paper is as fragile as the heart, and the older it gets the more brittle it becomes. Then, she would fit nicely through the bars.

One tiny (paper) tear for a missed celebration, stifled sob, empty rib cage.
I can see them all now, simply by knowing how long this one waited for them to come.
Their destination is an illusion. You could scatter them across the sea and they would all find refuge at the bottom of our ocean.

I still fold to this day, and wonder if you still do, too.

You plant a dead seed in the Winter
And tell a child to wait for Spring.

I am afraid that if I dare speak to you again there will no more be any words to say.
If we were to speak in another language and find a way to express this void,
Our hearts would explode from its sheer, bleach-stark truth.

There are not even any left to mean ‘I love you,’
but ‘I’ and ‘miss’ and ‘you,’
Promptly engraved on your organs by that gaping hole in your stomach,
The lingering taste of skin on your lips,
The thin sheet of sweat in your nostrils,
The disappearing bite marks along the curvature of your spine.

(The more distance sound has to cover, the less likely it will reach its destination.
There are no Grand Canyons in the Pacific Ocean, and words do not reverberate across clear skies.)

Every night, ‘You’ and ‘Miss’ and ‘Me’ form tentative droplets of water
They make their way down my neck,
Rest on the nest of my clavicle,
and stay there, stagnant, until morning.
(You were always a body of water to me.)

My stomach is gradually healing itself.
The stitches formed by the words
“Might’ and ‘Not’ and ‘Feel’ and ‘(the) Same’ are the most painful.

Could I blame him? He asked me to sing his favorite John Mayer song. Then the curtains fell from their state of grace, but there wasn’t any need to hang them until we finished; by then the windows had all fogged up. I didn’t know the lyrics to the song, so instead he had me struggling for the words to say. Because when the body struggles under another body’s weight, words become incoherent, obsolete, and syllables become the only words you need. Bated, gasping, ugh, unh, oohh. Our, he, his, my, I. I had invited him to our house. I laid him on our bed. He took his shoes off of his own accord, because to his (mis)understanding, it was my house.

It is impossible to be in two places at any given instance.

An example: I live in the little house on Valley Road. All my possessions are in my room on Lancewood Street. I live with my (chosen) family. My relatives are related to each other, as they also happen to be related to me.  The love of my life exhales, soundless against my neck, while I inhale the memories of a homeless Californian who found home with me.
I am awake yet I am not dreaming.

Observe: if you cut yourself up and entrust these pieces to the farthest corners of the universe, only one of the following can happen:
     1. You could stay just outside and encompass the whole universe along its perimeter (e.g. she encompasses the universe);
     2. You are just you still, and is within and inside the universe (e.g. she is among the stars in the universe);
     3. Your pieces will no longer be different from floating debris, ‘these’ are x number of pieces, and these pieces cease to carry your identity (e.g. ‘they’ (not she) are scattered far apart).

One cannot be all of these at once.

My heart belongs to one. It yearns for another. It believes in the one. It knows of no other happiness but with the other. I want to go, I want to stay. Distance is only too relative, yet both are, regardless, so far.

There are days when he mentions your name. I take it like a sugar pill — a little too sweet; becomes a coating of whateveritis on my tongue not long after; on my teeth, the grinding; what am I saying — I am no longer able to taste anything; maybe it’s better this way.
- There are days he says it might make me happy to be with you instead, it being easier. He is 7,307 mi away, and there are a million and one places you and I could ‘accidentally’ meet in this city. Today, I agreed with him, that it might be easier, but not for that reason.
- There are days when I wish he would stop being in my conscious so that I can remember memories from before him more clearly. I want him too much, so my mind focuses on the memories I share with him more. I have no energy left for anything else. I can’t remember what came before him and I can’t picture life after him.
- I became too confident that I have mastered the few concepts on life we so arduously pored over together; I have forgotten how to state them in words.
- There used to be a time when I couldn’t picture life without you too. I make too many drafts now, and edit posts after publishing [kudos to Adam Jones].
- I wish you didn’t let me give you up so easily. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been honest and clear about my intentions so there would be room enough for you to guess.
- I still can’t picture life without you.
- But you leave too quickly, I don’t know if this means anything to you. If I mean anything to you.
- I am still waiting for you to come back.
- Come back.