I want to ride with the van doors open.
I want you and you, and you, and you and you and you and you and you in there.
I want the wind to storm its way through the doors, and make it hard for us to breathe.
I want us to sing and laugh so loud, we can't seem to hear each other.
I want the ***** soles of your shoes against my shin, my hair in your open mouth and your shoulder molding painfully into my arm.
I want to see your shirt ride up your belly; I want to see the scars there before I eat you alive.
I want your neck on my tongue and my heart in your hands;
I want to pool in between your fingers so you'd have to skin yourself alive just to scrape me off.

I want to fall out of a moving car and be on the news.
I want my flesh to grate the asphalt so hard, you could look for me in between the cracks.
I want to slip off in a blur and taste the colors in the air;
I want you to know what my blood is like on your teeth and what my eyes look like on the pavement.
I want you to have my soul in your hands and to own me like I can't be robbed of my grave.
I want to be tattooed into the back of your eyes and see me in the darkness there.
I want to own what's been yours for so long.

I want you to wear my shirt when you go to sleep.
I want people to mourn then ask you what it was like to know me.
I want you to tell them I haunt you. That you love me. Despise me.
That they locked the casket cause they never found me.
That the truth is, I'm inside of you, every moment, awake and alive, breathing and not.
Buried where I'd never be found—that if they'd have to pay respects, they'd go to you instead.

I want to be rotting next to you so you're never alone.
Keeping you awake if you dare try to leave the thought of me.
Be the weight that pulls you back to bed; the curse that forces you into mourning.

I want you to ride up and down the road at night, so we can both be alone.
Lie down where you could find me, outlined and marked up from:

Marker 1, marker 2, and marker 3: past the corner, down the blind turn, scattered across a corn field.

You'd remember what shoes I had on.

You'd be wearing the necklace I always kept.

You'd know I smiled too much. Way too often.

You'd look at the ground in contempt before lying there, hoping I'd die. Just one more time. Praying that you could hate me.

Leave me there.

But you'd be laying in a field where our friend's van no longer returns.

You'd get up, dusting your jeans, sour-mouthed and empty. Shirt ***** from the muck, the asphalt glittering with me inside of it.

I want you to walk down the middle of the road where they placed lights to guide you. There can never be another me down that road again.  They hope not.

And you hope not too.

I want you to think of your soul left behind with me, where I lay scattered on the field.

I want you to know, even in pieces, we're happy.

That the world is willing to forget, and move on.

And you're trying. Always trying.

And I want that.

I want you to join me, because it wasn't  really me who died.

We're just paintings
on a plaster wall,
where chips fall
to the linoleum floor,

where we sweep aside
the love and the loss,
our prayers that we cuss
when we have nothing more.

Our exhibit is open
to the ****** and the wicked
and all the good and the naked;
those who blindly trust.

Our love chips off
but we are fine with that
for we never look back
pretending to say, "we must."

In years, maybe
when we're fading and old;
ripped off the frame,fold,
when we're hastily stashed away —

If we were humans,
who could move, love, kneel
kiss and frame, and steal,
please ask me: "would you stay?"

And, yes.
Yes, I would, anyway.

I cried again, at the thought of her
in between all the drifting stars.
I cried again, at the thought of her
in between my throbbing scars.

I asked my papa, when it'd leave
when my pain would finally stop,
but he shook his head in reprieve,
and from his mouth came a cough,

"It never leaves, only dulls,
never hardens, but never is the same;
you're my daughter, my only daughter,
you and I, we share a pain."

Mama, I cried, at the thought of her,
especially on the day when I left;
I came back into your loving arms,
and from my mouth, I finally wept.

Sometimes, I wish I've never known you;
where you've come from, where you've been.
I wish you were just a void,
with no knowledge to love,
and with no knowledge to hate.

But because of you,
I have a name to adore,
and a person to despise.
Because of you, there are places to which I want to return to,
and there are places to which I am reluctant to arrive.

Your words have always been writhing thorns,
on a beautiful wreath of roses, and I love them -
for what they are, for what they mean;
for how they make me look and feel,
but the knowledge of them hurts me.
The knowledge of them breaks me.

By the gods, I love you, but I hate you on me.

And when I look at you, I wish to kiss you from a distance.
When I look at you, I am torn - disembodied between
my love and the fractured memories.
When I look at you - you give me a name to
agonize over, when the days are empty,
and my heart seems full.

When I look at you, there are reasons why I hate to love you.

And god, do I miss you. When the words blend
into the grains of the wall,
and your face becomes the back of my eyelids,
I can't help but let my heart bleed dry.

God knows how I hate loving you.

When you hung the decor from the rafters,
       and built these walls with the prints of your fingers;
             proceeded to line the floors with flowers, wedged into gaps,
                  that were inconspicuous until each bud and shoot grew

Speak to me, everything you wanted to say;
          feeble may it be with the dull edge of your knife,
                softened by the mishandled touch of your previous lovers,
                        delicate from your pain, so you learned to be silent -
                                                                ­    
                                                            ­               never swift, never sure.

Your silent words fluttered in and out of sight,
    seared into my home like the etch of fire on word,          
         ingrained till the grains were no longer marks, but my haven
                       please tell, for a long time I've known, all this is true.

There are steel shears
in your lying hands
and a dress of hedges and thorns
that are my shielding woods.
In the back of my mind, as you hack
away at my limbs and marrow,
cut through bone and sinew;
I pray your blades grow dull
in what is left of me,
for steel simply rusts,
while I simply grow.

I'm glad I never met your face;
I'm glad  you're far from home;
I'm glad our meetings never came,
so I could cry in bed alone.

I'm glad our worlds were not the same;
I'm glad we  had our different zones;
Of time and space; of heart and mind—
of suffering—all which is my own.

For if we met, and found each other
Mapped every corner, bend, and contour,
I'd find I'd regret the day that I met you,
since seeing you would've hurt me more.

If I fall down a rabbit hole,
once or twice,
is it deliberate, or a mistake?
Am I being too nice?

I peer over the edge,
and throw my feelings down asunder;
hope it floods the rabbit hole,
as clouds rumble with thunder.

But it floats to the top,
and now, I have my own wishing well,
with bunny carcasses, snakes, egg shells,
oh well.

Empty it, bucket by bucket;
burry each skeleton in a bed of flowers,
until there is no evidence
of the feelings that I cower.

And rumble, comes the next thunder,
before I even wake.
I've stumbled down the rabbit hole
again, it floods the gate.

We are all jigsaw puzzles,
wanting to fit and to belong,
so if I rearrange the pieces
of my still broken heart,
please be patient with me.
If I have to coerce my heart
into the right place in mind,
please be patient with me.
If I have to rearrange
a real, proper smile for you,
please be patient with me.
(And if I have to turn my head
to properly kiss you,
please be patient with me).

For all the sake of confinement,
and rules, and laws, and all that is in motion,
my heart rattles in its cage and roars
like a beast, defying human nature.
In a matter of a second,
I succumb to fury. I am rage
juxtaposed to a calm face.
I wail and tear apart the truth,
limb by limb, for denial paves way
to the entrance of my home.

It lives with me, dines with me, sleeps with me;
a welcome resident within my haven.
For when you live through the ways of love,
and love in spite, (instead of loving for the sake
of loving yourself) only to be loved
because of your monetary value and
the vanity gracefully done on your face,
betrayal is strong and denial is natural.

For all the sake of confinement,
and rules, and laws, and all that is in motion,
even in most literature, we see,
only these people come to know love.

On the other hand,
when you are loved despite not having
money, looks, power, and influence,
they tell us it is blind, and sad.
Because our faces are not on LED screens,
and news outlets, or tabloids, or
made into a film adaptations,
in comparison, our love
is fleeting, and non-existent.

For all the sake of confinement,
and rules, and laws, and all that is in motion,
even in the love we see from those around us,
we are also told this is where love is, or where
it can never be found.

So beauty or no beauty; money or no money,
power or no power; some will never be loved and some will still be loved. As human as it is for us to deny, it is natural as well,
for human beings to defy and change and have different capacities to be loved.

So, love as if no screen can ever behold its depth.

In cords and ribbons;

she does not speak.
People don't know whether to
scoff, or to pity, both maybe.
Yet she continues,
her tongue clicking,
her hands swift and nimble,
as she cuts up her little heart
and neatly wraps each one
into a package with a small,
small love letter.

Simple words, straight forward
and easy to decipher, with
meaning so plain and tangible.
Her tongue clicks, words still
quiet, her fingers folding the envelope
so delicately. Scissors lay on the table,
for cutting bits and pieces of herself
into each small package.

She hopes, with the light of a candle
and a flicker of a match stick,
that people would notice
her silent devotion.
Would not scoff, nor pity.
Hoped they'd smile and laugh,
as they read each part of her;
saw each part of her;
noticed each part of her—

that were all in cords and ribbons.

In the height of a wave,
In the peak of a storm,
In the quiet of a moment,
In the heart that was torn;
Lay a moment of such wonder,
Lay a moment so profound,
Lay a moment so somber,
Lay a man in the ground;
People say that he was drunk,
People say that he was lost,
People say that he was kind,
People say that he was rough;
They whispered he had hurt,
They whispered he had God,
They whispered he had sinned,
They whispered he had none;
But it did not change the man,
It did not change the dead,
It did not change he loved,
It did not change how we would end.

I've seen the same roads,
those that lead nowhere
or cut into an end here,
reaching the edge of a mountain,
or to the lip of the sea,
or fading off into dust
and growing darker into
grainy asphalt—
that somehow hurts.

The roads straighten and curve,
and stretch and narrow,
and bend and break,
and crack just as it is filled
in between the seems.
They intertwine,
and meet in the middle,
and lead off somewhere,
like the t-boning of a barelling car,
going 40 on a 25.

The saddest roads are always short,
yet seeming endless in a moment
of brief contact.
The same speed,
the same view, and the same
edge by the sea, passing like
two stray boats at night.
The loneliest roads are parallel;
equal in distance, that can never touch. Side by side in meeting,
and always apart when leaving.

The loneliest roads taper off,
and stare at emptiness.
Paralell roads never meet,
and will always stay the same.

The loneliest roads between us
are just a few feet apart—
always infinite miles away.

In the course of the world's creation,
I've seen you somewhere, or everywhere, all at once.  

You mapped the stars by my side, when I didn't know where they were or what they were named.

You told me about fascinating little things that walked and lived, and breathed, with such enthusiasm, I began to learn that they existed with such amazement.

You formed nonsense of words, so ridiculous, you  made me question the peak of human intelligence.

You showed me gestures so small, or words that required no enunciation, I learned how silence spoke louder than our words.

You taught me so much, that eventually, I knew the feeling inside of me that grew in my chest, I no longer needed your assistance to name such.

Somewhere, everywhere, all at once, you were in the course of the world's creation.

The moment I took notice, the world stopped revolving.

And in that moment, it was just you and I.

Hey, I'm sorry
For not telling  you beforehand
I'm sorry
If I somehow make a mistake
I'm sorry
If I somehow hurt you again
I'm sorry
If I keep on loving you

But, you don't have to forgive me.

The living room is silent,
and my fingers are cold.
Have you come by in awhile?
Have you chewed on your nails,
pacing by the porch, before you brushed the brass knocker
with your rough knuckles?

The woolen blanket is missing,
from the back of my office chair.
I remember you stole it as a significant memento for yourself, when you stormed out. Your words knocked ice
deep into my throat, until it caused me
to lose the right words, to help you stay. Keep the demons at bay. The woolen blanket rarely helped,
unless I pressed the cloth into your
tired shoulders.

Do you miss me?
Does my touch still linger?
Sometimes, I see you across the street,
and frost grows at the edge of my glasses; a silent fury benign of threat,
but full of pain, making my bones creak and my back tingle. Makes my teeth chatter, and sweat build.

I still wonder,
when I peered behind the peephole,
to your bent head that looked
at your wavering hand by the brass knocker, scared to knock at the door.
Did you still love me back then?
Did you miss the press of my palms, and the kiss I gifted your forehead?
Was there still a remaining shred of love, left there for me?

But the living room remains silent,
and my fingers are cold.
When I see you across the street,
my heart drops, and your shoulders
are heavy, with or without the
woolen blanket. My glasses fog,
and every time I look into
the tiny peephole, not a single shadow remains there, for me to see.

Between the street, and porch of mine
that seems to rot away into the years of its growth, the rift only grows farther and farther apart, that even sorry cannot begin to cover the ravine between us.

I clench my cold fingers and cry, the day I finally acknowledged my futile efforts.

Between the porch and my brass knocker. Between you and the door.

Somehow, our love ended here.

you've filled every thought in my head
that you follow me back from home into bed.
I worry about who I'll be when I'm dead,
when all that I am is just of you instead.

Comes his waking breath
against my pinched face
in the early morning hour
of our lofty, soft embrace.
He pulls the sheets like the tide
of a sad twinkling moon,
making sure to hold me warm,
so that I won't leave so soon.

I brush your love,
and I am in a tizzy;
feet bare and loose
on the grass and soil,
reaching the far stretches
of land like the sea;
skies dappled with
large clouds, as blue and clear
as a baby's set of eyes;
love so deep and cavernous,
and wedged deep into the earth,
a depth of which I could not fathom;
strong and mischievous like the wind
in a storm of your emotions,
wrecking civilizations like they were
made out of paper.

You left me in awe
when you told me that
your love was boundless
like the universe.

So imagine my surprise
about the depth of your love
when I had once underestimated it
so much. When I brushed you off
like lint on my coats and shirts. Not
deeming you worthy of my time, as I watched you move and love another.

I have never stated that the love I had witnessed was ever mine.

After you, I've had the urge
to finally cut my hair
that ended beneath my waist
and looked good with
shoulders bare.

The length of it stretched on
and it reminded me of you.
The same endless cycle,
you'd always split off
into two.

Colours have faded now,
leaving the carcass of a strand.
A fraud of what it truly was,
growing under your demands.

But I face the mirror now,
as scissors went where you've dwelt.
My mother hacked away my hair
until I looked more like myself.

Remember those small ***** that wash up at shore,
in the event of a low-tide?

I am those *****, and you are the tides.
I lay buried beneath a surface of fine grains,
salvageable in your grasp. I wait, live with you,
call to you like a tenant to their home.
I descend into your hold, unknowing, or rather,
forgetting that you change.

You always do.

You are the tides, always shifting and moving;
slow to recede, fast to return. You hold me close,
take what is dear to me. You press, and you pull,
and you push, push, push, bringing everything
with you. Always leaving nothing for me.

I lay open, bare, confused by my lack of home,
discarded like a stone, left to search for you
into deeper waters.

When you come back, you are new;
perhaps warmer, or perhaps colder,
depends on where you've been. Where
your currents always travel.  It always
depends on where you've been, but your
current had brought with it my filter of grains,
the white stark sand. The place I rested,
and where I deemed my home.

And you left it somewhere far beyond my reach,
apathetic to my struggle.

With your new presence, you leave me to burrow once more,
either shallower or deeper than before, in grainy arms
and lulling currents, making me anticipate when you would
leave again. Because I always have to find a new way to fix and
build my home, when the only thing you've ever done is make
me wait for you to come back.

And I am always surprised of the fact that I always stay.

Somehow, words bleed into the night,
and your voice is on the other end of my ear.

I know, my form lacks beauty, and the way I confess lacks grace or dignity that comes with the frail women you like. I know my antics are somewhat crude, and I still am a mystery to myself.

But fulfillment is having your chest stuffed with the sky and a bed of flowers. It is having 2am filled with your laughter, and their laughter. It is forgetting all beauty, all grace, all that binds misconceptions in the world, and leaving only your heart, theirs, and the love that you give.

Funny stories fill the room, hearts quiver with the truth. And the next day that we meet, we play with our friends, you cover my eyes and laugh, and I try to pull your hand away. You tap your forehead against my shoulder, and miss the way my heart beats.

Your smile is beautiful, I think.

And though a small part of me still wants their love, they're still here. We don't say my affections out loud after that night, but they respect me, and I respect them.

And isn't the person I love so wonderful?

I open the door.

It creaks open,
and my fingers tremble at the ****.
Beyond the small window,
and the pounding of my heart.

We are close enough,
and my words are lodged up somewhere-
everywhere-all at once!

I want to say hello, for you to smile my way.
The yearning in my heart grows stronger,
but aren't we just friends? Can't I just say it?

So why, why, why,
is my body frozen to the door?
To the side?
As you pass by?

I need to move somehow,
just a little bit, *please.

But you open another door.

And it closes.

We were a country that lived near the equator;
I was the land and you were my infinite sky.
We have lived and witnessed our aeons together.
Each moment fleeting, and passing by.  

The wind whispers, and the creatures rumble
weeping for me the unfair weather I hold
Only the dry seasons and the rainy seasons come by
and the sky, he's always done what he's always told.

When he cries, he creates floods and storms
or peaceful drizzles and ditz so plain
and when's angered, he takes right up
the moistened land and then grants me pain.

At night, he's terribly beautiful and quiet
the stars twinkle like stickers on my attic
The silent love, and the prolonged memories
and what he holds, goes far beyond semantics.

I sung, "Precious sky, I am your earth
the land you watch with clouds and dew."
And he replied, "Pretty land, you are my purpose
and there's nothing to take me from you."

I'm a quiet woman.
A dangerous one at that.
Give me love, and it's dangerous
for a woman like me.

I don't burn men;
I don't provoke women.
I don't mount weights on my shoulders,
I don't move castles just for myself.

I'm a quiet woman.
A dangerous one,
that once you give me love,
I will swallow lit matches
into my gas-filled lungs
and breathe fire
to my terrible world
to burn, burn, burn
and rub ash on my skin,
hoping it will fix my aching heart.

Hope peace for a dangerous woman like me.
Hope nothing else will fall apart.

Suddenly, there's more than distance and heat. There's your heart and your soul.

Inside your embrace, and your thrumming flesh. There's more, there's more, I want to know.

I've met him twice; for months; and now years, into jubilees.
His name is Gabriel, and he means regret (in the language my heart only began to speak after him).

The way I know him, sinks deep into my soul like a splinter, hurting me more as he burrows. He refuses to love; is willing to be cared for. Never returns, doesn't even borrow, but nonetheless, he takes, and takes, and takes. He is a selfish man, the regret I've named Gabe.

We once held hands, and when I looked into his eyes, I poured my soul into the void he called his heart. And he took that love-and took it all, all, all and then gave it away.

My heart learned how to write songs because of Gabe. It broke, and it learned, and it began to write as if the endless words I wrote were expectant of the love he never gave; for the hurt he always seemed to be generous upon.

And I drank it all up, with a pinky held high, and he was not made of the substance I thought him to be.  But Gabe was a lesson, was an epiphany, was an age-old history (of aeons of regret).

Yet, he was once the substance that had made me.

A bitter heartbreak over a cup of tea.

We fill them with love, and love, and love—

then they are filled with love to share with someone else.

Bravery is swallowing iron, belly pooling with lava, as I face towards the horizon. Death croons and taunts, offering their hand, and I give no response.

"There is time for that, but not now. Not yet."

I watch the horizon grow, before I feel Death's icy hands on my neck.

The tips of her lashes
were silver like rainfall,
and her hair was the sea at night,
her flesh was the clouds
obscuring the warmth of the sun,
and her teeth were the glinting knives.

No obsidian dark
could outshine her eyes,
and her words were a painful storm.
The more she breathed,
a new star awoke,
and in the darkness, I grew forlorn.

we loved,
and kisses were butterflies,
hugs were butter on toast,
and sunshine was food to the soul
as we loved and was loved the most.
we lived,
and years were but mere moments,
lives were just as opaque as mist,
as seconds lasted morbidly slow eternities,
passing the bits of memories we missed.
we left,
too early for man to heal,
footsteps so light, without simple sound,
lived years of love and pain away,
making me think, "were you even around?"

Big and bold, in the likeness of capital words
burning through my lids:
"WE ARE DATING NOW!" screams at me
in the darkness.
Tell me why, what little happiness that
resided in my diminutive heart, died down without a sound?
I should be happy; smile graceful, heart light as always,
to know that you have found someone.
He deserves you, and you deserve him.
My feelings don't matter, put way beyond the display,
behind, behind, behind.
You matter to me, and come forward
before everything I know and feel,
metallic taste on my tongue,
heart bursting every so slowly,
yet now, I say otherwise.

The screen remains dark throughout the night.

(23 messages from Your Favourite Girl)

I climb,
in the lip of monsters,
in the best of demons,
rock, fire, ash,
skin dark and flaking,
tongue to the roof,
feet scraping,
to the precipice,
of here and there,
to before, into beyond
"in love"--
"into death".

Shards scatter the kitchen floor;
Joel Adams plays through the radio.
Hearts chained down, wrists throbbing.
Phantoms appear, knocking the lungs empty.
He?--She?--Them; they appear on the table,
where guests are supposed to sit. The counter,
the couch, the bedroom (where guests are not supposed to be).

(But you reminisce, they're not guests anymore.)

The shelves are cold--freezing even, like a snow storm
has passed by. Not only that, but the pillows, notebooks,
that spot on the floor, the jacket, their mug.
Every single thing they've touched, it freezes every time,
and it stays.

Yearning for warmth no longer there.
Fire no longer burns, heat but a necessity.
But there is eternal warmth in the body;
the blood. The kitchen is scattered with shards of
mug, and where warmth is found in blood, fingers
squeeze onto pieces of glass.

Once again, it is warm, it is relief.

You feel warm again.
But where blood and body meet, there is no end nor beginning.
Where there was, there is.

(It's always been like this.)