for the forest in which too many were lost but only a few made it out alive

(This is for eyes as clear as Spring and as cold as Winter)


I have traded my excitement for poetry; for spirit can only wander much until spirit sobers up.


Galaxies away, yet they’re stealing my Sun. There’s something pretty about It rising every hour, but darkness isn’t always sad; only cautious. That’s all.


This is how oblivion works: there’s a storm on the surface of your moon and I can’t hear it. I can’t pull the tide away from the shores of your heart, but I can try and sink the craft, until we sail home, to the clouds. Fly not, for wings melt but sails do not.


The clouds: far away and high.


Dawn is cold and dry.


Still, I have a hope for a midnight sky filled to the brim with stars whose iridescence would fuse fantasies to the lead in your veins.


I think I saw Heaven glistening in your brain. I kept telling myself that the trip to Heaven was worth the fall. Tell me it was worth the fall.


Somedays, it feels like the back of your mind is broken. Like I am going to jump back into nothingness if you don’t mend it with days lost to a future far away from now.


I have swallowed so much pride, it’s making me sick. It makes me sick that I have the courage for you but not for me. That I live for you but not for me. 


That it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference because not two forevers are exactly the same.

Existential Crisis

You close your eyes and think particles are blind, you shut your mouth and act deaf. You exist; you are in a room that is. There is a universe in your mind. There is a supernova on your neck. Necked from the Big Bang. There is a black hole in your lisp. In your speech, space fulminates. In your spine, mortals live and mortals die. Stars illuminate inside your chest. 

Manumitted by a first breath, life injected in the cells; behold lessening the jolts. Behold learning the crypts.

You swim. You land. You eject a second breath. Tattooing fingerprints on your children's foreheads. And then you walk, carving footprints on the seabed for meteorites to trace. 

We found hearts in a cleft. The clefts made a stream. The streams we wrecked, until our shadows became streaks. Conversed by smiles that spoke of engravers. We felt what no other creature could feel; tribe is safety, hunt is stability, loss is thirst. Home is circular and beasts are slaves.

We fought over land and game but still you remained under my skin —in the bones: free radical, wild and intangible, unrooted and disputant. I hinged on the mountains and you left like a fortune teller with not much for a luck. Floating on self-destruct. Traded your crystal ball with the globe, books with papercuts, lovers with stains. Loaded your pen-pencil with leads, and wrote me mechanical.

My people wandered Earth for water, and gulped down the seaside. My people are seasick. My people, their knees bleed on the plants lurking in the sunrise. My people, they shred the lands, wondering whose good is better. But only you know that insistence is good enough and resistance can keep you alive.

The world is our playground: valleys are slides when destruction is erupted. A tide is grace if you keep from drowning. Glazed eyes fool what the mind can already feel.

You are a billet for bullets lost and dutiful.

And it's beautiful how foggy and misprinted your eyes can be. And it struck me that you were as oblivious as I thought you would be. But blueprints cannot be read by no expert.

My alibi is all that I've been dreaming of; angels doing handstands and bobbing their heads to punk rock and that was nowhere near healthy. And I might be guilty for the emptiness inside me but yeah whatever.

The sun heat is like waking up to shrapnel and duds in your bed.

My problem is that you are my own presence. And I can't be there without you roaming my spectrum. All I think of is influenced by all I think of you.

These days, you cross my mind like any simple thought, even though I thought we weren't supposed to think about each other anymore.

You were never able to stain me; you just taught me to say what I think and scribe what you say. You turned my day into night while the night was still a night and you promised me an armor that would bring the Sun to its feet. And that we'd flee this world whenever our chances was to clear out of this dome and pray that our friends would pray for us too.

But you are not like your friends and I am not like my friends and I don't know why we insist on calling them friends when obviously they would leave us alone with our migraines under the steamy sand that stand for the dirt we've racketed.

The soil that is lavished with its generosity to give birth to trees that can only converse with the rain. There's a reason trees don't grow near the sea.

It is all a ballad of shaky handshakes and sweaty palms holding unto each other like flood and pulse is the ark. 

People like us pretend to wear their pride like dignity that hangs on rooftops and trips on full stops.

Hands like yours remain like photographs which remind me that my forever is just not yours and that we both are finite.

Right then, I knew I was breathless but I was lunging. I was longing, for a walk that could calm me down but could also keep me ignited because peace was drifting and I didn't want to drift away from myself.

But now? Right now, I feel so little. And so young. And so naive. But I am little. I am young. And I am naive. I stress my words where my worlds end: when I just can't speak, even if I try to sugarcoat all what I've written.

So, I stop writing. And I clear my throat, ready for something I'm unprepared for. And so it is attacked and it's gouged by the ticking of my wristwatch.

This is how to live when it's the possibilities that guide you to where you belong.

Pulp;

I have found sainthood within you.

You conquer my voice, even though it dances to the shivering of my fingers. The universe slows movement in each of your syllables and you leave me shaken, waiting for explanations. And I don't know what to expect.

I lock myself in for a moment or two, counting the seconds before you become my first, having no excuse; only scenarios as they wrap around our necks. But I'm the one losing breath.

I have found poetry in your guitar strings.

Ink-printed notes, muffled behind standing ovation, yet you still are a play.

And if bobby pens were voyagers, they would've made it to so-called villages, rumbled inside waves like duplicates of the sun rays, illuminating knots as they are. Your shoulder blades would've been shorelines and then fullstops.

Darling, we must be shattered enough to convulse Atlas off our berm

And we must be shattered enough

To scatter the children of bedlam for nameless skeletons. With bony toes that still curl platforms; this is one of three deadly things the dead can feel. The other two being rebirth and dirt.

There are too many wishbone bridges to carry a city of friability and to fill in blanks, wreckage for river banks. 

And then you speak flat notes fleeing opera house.

I have found pavements in your footprints.

This is how to find a way out with a broken compass.

This is how I bypass my base because I'm so easily triggered; my arms are rifles and, to my surprise, I carry bullets. 

Throwing stones from a glass door is the revolution sealing your backbone shut.

Secrets occupy the heart, rumors flow in the student body.

Beauty is learnt to exist like desired destruction, insisting on decaying like rubble that once built monuments for moments I used to count.

I am bound to be your angst-driven, self-indulgent lullaby.

I have found night watch circling your wrist instead of wristwatch.

Cremate me and scribe my ashes then scrub off the dust. Because home is the brutality in honesty which strengthens your temples. 

I am restless between elbows, I bow to never finish writing our closure, as I am trying to capture what's always vivid, and maybe this is why I am a flailing failing photographer.

After all, serendipities do no good to sirens. And you are the mess I regret creating and cleaning up.

I speak in the most improper of languages, but if you don't have a breaking point, you're already at it.

This comes from where I love rather from where I hate.