whose name made you drink enough to forget your own?

why are you slurring, stumbling, shivering, shaking,

your mouth a spillage of magenta and fuschia,

hands slung over your best friends as they steady you into a car,

a cab they've called in a flurry of messy text messages and laughs,

joking about how drunk they've gotten to make sure his name

never perforate itself in your mind again.

you thought the two (or eight) shots you down,

in flimsy, rough, swallows of gasoline and heartbreak

will bury him in a box underneath the dirt floor of your mind

but his nomenclature refuse to transform from 'love' to 'stranger'.

he stays, he stays, he stays

unlike his form, his body, his soul,

and in the vagaries of life,

we lose and we lost,

because a girl's love changes,

like the seasons,

and we can heal,

we can break,

but we'll be okay,

once again.

velvet stains on the crevice of your lips,
and you taste like water, not whisky.
your lucid sky-coloured gaze chase to meet me,
and even in the dark, they're evergreen.

they say that we're made of blue blood,
but all i taste is red, red, red- metallic, like rust,
i can feel my heart pulsing underneath my wrecked lungs,
because here am i, soaked in your stardust.

the room is struck with electricity when you arrive,
ochre colours my cheeks and heat in my skin rise,
like the silver waves, you sweep me in with the tide,
and once again, i'm yours, lovely, you have me stupefied.

when i'm around you, my heart pumps crimson,
and i wear your breath on my neck like a chain of diamonds,
and you look at me, glory behold like i'm your redemption,
like i'm an ultraviolet, phosphorescent burst of magnetism.

(i want you to look at me like that forever).

we are all afraid.

when we hide under the static lights of our intergalactic worlds,

behind the screens of our digital age,

it is all because we cannot take risks,

risks of rejection, being unloved, tossed aside

and forgotten like a page dog-eared and bookmarked with a faded polaroid taken

with shaky hands in a half unread book.



we are all afraid.

it is better to say nothing at all,

and let it hang stagnant between two

sad souls, rather than take a leap

and hope- because hope is stupid.

it is a flimsy plastic emotion, on the verge of breaking because

that's what people are- fragile and weak.



we are all afraid.

from a five-year-old refusing to learn

how to ride a bike to an eighteen-year-old

runaway, who looks at a crumpled map,

lost with a chip in her shoulder

and we fear the unknown but we disguise it

under tacky bright yellow stickers

with fake happy slogans that make no sense.



we are all afraid.

we wipe the tears off our cheeks and

prays silently that nobody sees,

because then they'll ask if we're

okay and when we really want to say we're not,

we swallow the truth and plaster a smile.



we are all afraid.

and it's the most human feeling-

the sharp sting of fear and it's telling us maybe,

just maybe

its because we are scared

that maybe nobody really loves us

at all.