women are not beautiful.
they are magnetic, majestic, magnificent,
they are more than doll bodies and ****** eyes,
they are more than what they were born with.

women are not beautiful.
they are effervescent, enigmatic and evergreen,
they are more than paper-thin waistlines and cherry lips,
they are more than what the eyes can look upon.

women are not beautiful.
they are powerful, passionate, and puissant,
they are more than barbie figures and pink hemlines,
they are not beautiful simply because they are more than that.

your shadow lingers
from time to time
you're especially apparent
in the twilight
when the sun is burnt
and the horizon blushes,
i think of your feather-soft hands,
how your promises once sounded
and all that blue in your closet.

by the morning
you've taken your things,
and disappeared into the ashes
without a trace,
i think of how we used to love,
like little children running down streets,
lacing our shoes and kissing our bruises,
and now we're too old for our bodies,
our souls are too weathered and battered
for such a thing.

teach young girls how to love themselves
so they'll trust a man who would do the same.

we are a generation of sedation,

discursive, empty, godless children,

raised in the age of social media,

where the height of our emotions

lie in our 'thoughts and prayers',

and the best we can do is a touch of a button,

a share, a like, a tweet, a reaction documented,

rumination we pretend we've borne.



is it our intrepid numbness to it all?

after all, we are best known for

the plight for attention and validation,

or rather yet our entitlement and our narcissism,

terrorism doesn't have a face unless i see it,

and it begs the millennial question,

are we just a bunched of depressed sociopaths?



or is it because we are the privileged 20%,

nestle in the fringes of developed nations,

with our precious technology and our internet,

unbeknownst to a third world, a third world

we mourn according to how it benefits us.

after all, don't forget that in an emergency,

there is always 'thoughts and prayers'.

-

stick and stones may break my bones
but words will carve into my soul
and mar upon the walls of my heart

so i turn the poison you spit at me
into knives i cut myself and others with,
until i realize i hold a special power

i hold a power to neutralize your acid
and transform your vitriol into water-
a spilling fountain of kindness and forgiveness.

did you had to pluck my flowers
just so yours could grow?

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.