Please don’t let me be like my Mother.

Don’t let me be the woman
Who never gave me a second glance
Because whenever it came to children
She stopped loving at one.

Don’t let me be
The woman who gave her all to the first born,
But when it was me
She gave it all up.

Don’t let me be the woman who smoked
Half a lung into ashes,
Every night thinking I don’t see
The grey puffs rising to my window
Darkening my room
Choking me as it slowly became the air I breathe.

When I grow up,
Don’t make me marry a man
Who never loved
And lived for numbers upon papers
Caring more about his reputation
Than his own blood he weaved into
Us.

When I grow up
Let me teach my children
Happiness and what it is like to smile,
Instead of drilling into their brains
All the reasons they should cry
And drown in their tears.

When I grow up,
Don’t let me search for my dreams
At the bottom of a shot glass
Taking more and more
As I get drunk on false, temporary happiness.

Don’t let me come home to my children,
Telling them how useless they are,
Throwing things at them
And finally collapsing into a heap of hopelessness.

Please don’t let my children
Have a father who never even cared
Enough to remember their birthdays
Let alone save them from the nightmare
That was their Mom.

Don’t let me become
The reason my children cried at their reflection
Because beauty never defined them
The reason they refused to eat
Since the flesh on their body
Kept growing in their eyes only.

Never let me be the woman
Who found only the ecstasy
She bought through men each night.

Even then it wasn’t love.
Even now it isn’t love.
She never learned to love people like me.
But I loved her.

Yet it was forced,
I only saw the mistakes she made
Every time I looked at her.
Including myself.

Please, when I grow up,
Let me learn to love my skin
And suffocate in all the things that make me
Beautiful.

Let me prove to the woman who claimed
To have raised me up
That I will never make the same errors or ever be like her.

I’ll love, I’ll live, I’ll care.
Three things she never grew up to do.

When I grow up,
Please don’t let me be like my Mother.

Oh my sweet misery,
No point in fighting you,
You will start again
I'm human indeed
Still feeling her skin on my fingertips
She is only in the wind
Scent of punk rock, grunge and cigarettes remain
I wander alone on the subway, to forget her
Trying to forget her intoxicating scent
I want to get away, everything to start again,
Oh my sweet misery

I tasted a bit of love ... with her,
Like a drop of honey, thick and sweet.
Do not ask me to dance again,
Never without her.
In this vast city, I'm invisible
And then ... here you come again, sweet misery!

Your hair –
twilight strands of, “now'd,”
gotten longer and were so silently dreamt of last Tuesday.

Your fingers –
finally allowed, followed to weave my own,
and all that'd been prior washed away;

Dirt, gizzards and blasphemy, along with the boils from my father’s dead hands.

Your hips –
whispered 'morrow and all the jubilance expelled,
so that the same morrow's sun'd show eminence once again.

Your eyes –
said, “baby,” if only, “baby,” and, “baby, it'll be ok,”
it'll always be, “A-OK.”

So when your heart –
let me and finally to cry, appendage etched eyes,
eyes etched the night and sure, summer'd be at end,

but autumn could taste oh so much better.

Google tells me it's an eight hour time difference.


Already absent,
my heart already fonder
for memories we hadn't been able to make yet.
Time is slow. You can sleep, then wake up.
Because of that: I haven't even bat an eyelid yet.

Unblinking in these unholy stretches
of distant poetry where I am God, I  
watch our oblivious universe. Make something of it.
Fashion us a happy ending, if you will.

But you're there, and
I'm here.
So...


                               ...would you mind

                               if we talked

                               about infinity...

                                                               ...tonight?


Google tells me it's an eight hour time difference,
so tonight is meaningless to you.
You see the sun, I see the stars.
But who can say
one of us is more blind than the other?

Who is to say what is wrong
and what is right,
when we live in a world
where I, Romeo
and you, Juliet
can commit suicide
when it's both day and night?

Such things are preposterous...
even more so than I pretending to be God
with my pen of hormones and heartbreak...
Who am I to think that I could  possibly... make something of it.
Or fashion us a happy ending, if you please.

I am mere, and powerless before the rotations of the Earth
just as I am powerless to my impulse
to click the refresh button
over any one of your profiles,
thinking it's somehow better to read 'About Me,'
then to ask about you.


Refresh.


Google tells me it's an eight hour time difference,
and neither Romeo or Juliet are dead.
Though they never lived as nothing more than characters;
we are people. You and I are not tragic concepts;
we are merely circumstance to
an arbitrary mixture of romance films, evolutionary biology-
all subject to the Earth's curvature, the Sun's shadows,
and the mocking Moon's stolen light. Simultaneous.

But because I am self-aware
I can be the **** of my own jokes
rather than the ****-end
of God's lonely, bored cigarette...

...It always has to end with
depressing existentialist philosophy,
doesn't it? More reflections or rejections
of purpose or meaning
of heaven and hope
or whatever will close the golden gates
of happiness to me. It just always
has to end that way, even though I'm not a French writer...

... I could still romance you with my words
and hold you as comfortably as I could my favourite book.
Not too tight. Not too loose. Lightly, effortlessly-
that's how it felt
to kiss you Goodbye
and all of that jazz.

And now after all that, the blues.


Refresh.

You remind me of wet socks
and November mornings.
A bitter sensation
that leaves me begging
to peel you off my soaked feet.
You overwhelm me.

i don't want to flatten you out
put you on a frame in the hall of fame
where people would go just to gawk and stare at you
that would be so cruel of me, because you-
you
are so much more complex than that
you are the foundation of a house
something everyone takes for granted because they cant see it
how many times have you slipped out unnoticed
by those looking for the shiniest, brightest stars in the world
if you look for those
you miss the planets
you miss the way that you sleep with a shirt over your head to "block out the light" so you can sleep better
you miss the ridiculous, pleasurable conversations
"did you know that Louie Armstrong would cut off the callouses on his lips with a pocket knife?"
"we should write a comic strip about a starch that smokes **** and call it "The Baked Potato."'

let's keep away from the photographers, the paparazzi, the artists, the writers

you hate attention anyway
said you would rather "sleep on the roof for a week" than give a presentation in public

i have discovered you
but i won't ever tell

the books will not mention you
there will be no statues of us
but the ones we build with sugar cubes on the privacy of our own kitchen table
where messes like us can be swept away and kept in no other place than our memories
and the storage on my phone

i will memorize the lines on your torso and back
but children will never study you in geography, they will never be asked the year you were born or at what latitude and longitude your chest muscles meet your abdominals

a search on Google will pull nothing about you

you remain undiscovered
to all
but me.