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.

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.

They came before dawn,
and took us from our cribs.
But we ran and ran from
our place full of woes,
riding until the next tomorrow.
Ghosts running to the horizon.

But we were transparent in the light,
even as we held hands.
I didn’t want to be a ghost on the run.
I don’t want to feel like the things I could hold
are far away and nothing but a mist.
I don’t want to feel like our love is nothing but air.
A ripple in time that fades away.

I want to meet your lips.
I want to hold your hands.
I want to hug you when I see you.
But I’m a ghost in the horizon,
drowning in the sea.

I see you, but you can’t see me.

Blood boils over the chalice
in an insurmountable quantity,
pouring straight through the cracks,
spilling on the concrete and it stays,
dried like the Sahara, waiting for it to be scraped
off into non-existence

But it's torment to stare,
to remember the flitting thoughts
that refrain the calm to get back

Adamant to get over our Achilles heel,
striking the bruised flesh over and over
on a wall in detriment of our anger
Persistent to stand still on its feet,
to knock us over and over again

A breathing torso, has a defended chest
Guards are held up around the beast
Confined in a cage that turns brittle to
the eternities that pass by, and it crumbles

We crumble.
It's torment to think about it and not
to let it in.

I know there’s a
storm inside of you,
a rainstorm over the sea.
Every time you cry out,
a flood drowns you in,
and you can’t seem to see me.

—when all you want is for
me to save you.

This is the worst feeling
to be drowning on something
that's not there.
Becoming the empty shell
of a fool who had fallen in love
with the thought of loving someone
instead of the action of doing so.

And you never know how much
it hurts to love someone
when they finally let you go.
And you never know how much
more it hurts to know
that you already had a chance
of doing so.

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.

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).

I found solace in the darkness
that has robbed me of my freedom.
The darkness that feeds off of me
when I am nowhere near light.

It dictates my inner most fears of
lingering in the shadows of my own being,
yet lighting a path to my incendiary fate
that I know I can suffer for eternities in
the hellfire of my mind.

But the rain rocks my windows, and thunder claps
against my ear like a game in our room of heaven and hell.
It rattles my inner most being, and the strings that
tie me to my friends and family sever themselves
in the fall of twilight. From that, I know,
darkness has robbed me once again of light.

It’s a bitter fate I had the opportunity to accept;
darkness was then a conformity that I lived with.
My place of dwelling. And from letting this darkness
inhabit me for so long, I have come to love it. I have come
to live with it, for without darkness, light will be no more.
I have learned to love such a feared part of me. A loathed
part of me. I’ve seemed to forgotten it even existed along with me.

Darkness was but another part of me that couldn’t exist without
the light. I was given a chance to live in this world, and I would live. I will live. But life comes before death, and tragedy comes in the middle of our peace. Darkness is just but one of them I have come to accept.

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?

There are no coherent words escaping your lips
Your eyes pry mine open for me to see and listen
Your neck strains against your collar to choke out the words
I only wanted to hear what I wanted, versus what you said

Your chest rises in a motion too fast, I stumble
You cry because of the words I refused to accept
You plead with me to come to terms to the truth you mouth to me
But I refuse, because my fingers covered your mouth instead.

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.

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.)

It hurts inside, you see,
because you never think of me,
the way you think of someone else,
someone who I'll never be.

But don't you dare come closer,
don't come to me this time,
when you lament all about her,
How dare you think it's fine?

Because I've known you longer,
and I still think it's unfair,
how you know little about her,
but forget that I am there.

And yet, I know this isn't love, but
nevertheless, it hurts,
how you inflict pain on me
without actually saying those words.

This is why we burn and we fade
because we are mere gasoline
attracted to flames.

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.

her fingers are numb
thinking of touching him
not because of how cold he was to her,
but because the warmth was never for them
in the first place.

Oh, she's crying again.

She stutters.
Because there are too many words to say.

She hick-ups.
Because the words were hard to swallow.

She heaves.
Because the pain is too much.

She wipes away her tears.
Because there is no handkerchief or tissue to offer.

She smiles.
Because she learned how to cry many times, before learning to hide.

She limps away.
Because a girl like her had tattoos, painted black and blue.

She comes the next day.
Because there is no other thing to do but expect the same thing.

She's bleeding.
Because writing with a red pen on her arm was a habit of hers before bed, and she loved painting her bed sheets and bathroom floor red.

She heals.
Because getting hurt makes your body do the same thing.

And she cries. Again. And again. And again.
Because it's the same thing all over again.

She stutters.
She hick-ups.
She heaves.
She wipes away her tears.
She smiles.
She limps away.
She comes the next day.
She's bleeding.
She heals.
And she cries again.

And she does the same thing.

She makes my heart weep.

We’re midnight wanderers together.
The moonlight loves us, just as we love each other.
We stay by the gas station, watching people flick cigarettes and smoke dangerously close, but we never stray from the possibility of burning. Never when we’re in each other’s embrace.

And we felt infinite back there, at the gas station, seeing cars zoom past us, feeling the lonely night creep back. Seeing the stars above us go into motion. Feeling the emptiness that receives no bottom as we drown in each other’s running time.

And our eyes capture each other. And the human is captured. Just in each other’s sight. The ghastly existence of each other, acknowledging  we are mere immortals inside rotting bodies, and we knew we could feel it. The humanity that seeped into our bones, and the melancholy and sadness, and the ephemeral happiness, and the days of lodging and the emotion that fuelled our existence. In the gas station, fuelling cars.

We were aware of how limited our time was, and the feelings that replaced our fervour to chase after time. The blunders that caused our reckless fate. Our emotions that finally destroyed us.

And we stayed that way in the gas station, waiting to be burned into ashes. We accepted our bottomless dark emotions, platonic yet deadly, because that was the way it was. We fell in love with each other's humanity, one that needed to be let out near the gas station, just in case we burned ourselves.

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.

With one look,
he sets my soul ablaze.
With one look,
he can end my passing days.
With one look,
he taught my heart to stay.
With one look,
he took my heart away.

I don't know what to do.
The lines of memories
both sad, happy
a momentary stun of a supernova
blinding me with a light
so dark
so dim
the moment of peace
turns into a fight

They say my name
an echo of a wind
a fading star
forever pulverized into dust
exploding but not returning evermore.

My name.
My name.
It's in the dark, and it stays there.

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.

It's not as if we've never been here before.
We always fell to rock bottom, and we've always hurt now and then.
But I guess, with each new experience, I've come to learn a lot of things. That, yes, maybe it hurt to be here down with you.

That maybe falling down was always the price to pay.

But who said falling in love never even hurt?

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)

My fascination for the morbid,
and the unthinkable is grotesque
in all manner, though it is something
that I do quite relish
for in the concept of it all,
I am quite taken by the blunt
cruelty of the world,
though I am not such a person.
There is loneliness that drifts
amongst those who breathe
simply to survive;
and then there is struggle
and ache,
and misery,
to those who understand far more
than what I can.

My interest is grotesque indeed,
to simply watch scenes unfold
like the wings of a raven, unfolding
like plastic fans with cheap rings at the end
slowly coming undone
as time wears down the bones;
no longer breathes simply
to survive.
Her lips become unsealed,
as she spills her urge to
confront her lover.
He hesitates in the face
of an oppressing threat.
They cry under great pressure.

I am fascinated, by the flamboyance
of the suffering; their strong strides
that hold no actual magnitude.
Their faux smiles that sing of
fresh blood mixed with their saliva
hiding behind trembling teeth;
strong hands that hold far tighter
than usual, when I comfort them,
and their suffering bleeds out of their wounds
like the lungs do oxygen,
and mind you, it surrounds me like a fog.

I have a morbid interest,
of watching it all unfold,
but that is what I simply am.
I am a bystander; a silent witness.

I simply wonder why these people
have the urge to come undone
before me. Why am I such a good
ear to their loud silence.

But ah, I understand now.
I am the same like them;
as you are me now.

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.

It was slow and sudden, and I was stuck in space when you slowly tucked your hair behind your ears. I stared for too long, my eyes shooting holes into your fingers, into your shadowed skin, into your tear stained lashes, and into your quiet lips.

You were beautiful, your smile says it all.

Your eyes says it all.

And when you looked up and your eyes met mine, I looked away. I heard your laugh escape those closed lips, and in this time of a battling silence, I was internally screaming and crying, shouting and smiling. I was sad and happy, and you were making me that way.

You didn't know.

"What are you looking at?" I heard you say, and that voice. There is no other voice like that in the world.

"Nothing," I answered.

Everything. That's what I'm supposed to say.

And you didn't know, and it was better that way.

Our love will never be a thing of today or tomorrow, but it will always be there. It exists, and blooms first thing in the morning, but even if you don't find it, it is there. Only, it is asleep, and you wake up, only if it matters.  

Some days, I wake up with a hole in my chest, some days, I wake up with my chest filled with too much, that it hurts beyond words. Do I burst with joy? Burst with ire? Or burst into red dahlias and daffodils?

Because I always hold the watering can with earnest, the grooves of its handle imprinted in my hand, as I water my garden each and every morning. And you don't notice them, the flowers that I make bloom.

You gave me the red dahlias and daffodils, and I always close my eyes at night, thinking one day you will notice.

And I know you won't.

But I go on anyway, with my morning gardening; keeping the soil, cutting what has died, keeping them alive from morning through night, caring  this way always, without self-regard.

This is my way of love.

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.