Heart-in-mouth Syndrome

I’m lovesick and I’m sick of love, 
Do you feel it too, do you feel me in your veins,
the way you’ve made a home out of my rotten brain?
It has never felt flowers before (not to say you are a flower when you are so much more)
But this is close enough, you are close and my teeth are soft.
My words have lost their bite, my claws cannot hurt you,
how did this come to be?
Out of ruin, out of ash, out of nothing except something completely else?
Now you’re taking over my life, bringing me back to life, making me fight for it
I would die for you and for someone on the street,
but you’re making me want to live so long that I keep this secret alive
Like a fluttering thing in my rib cage, no, not a heart,
it is a seedling, it is a tiny flower. It is a small, small bird
but it is out of the egg now and it will fight to stay alive,
fight to hear your voice, fight to hear everything you say, and more that you don’t.
Will you say it please,
the words want out, so will you cede,
will you let them out?
Make the chains around my neck fall away
so the lock turns into whatever locks are when they are not making things harder?
Don’t you want to hear the words too? I know you do
but tell me it is just as much as I do,
tell me you’re lovesick and sick of love too

And say it like you asked me the first time if I was alive, 

and it was the first time I was asked if I was alive 

after a gaping maw of void where I floated as a ghost. 

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Image credits.

Hummingbird Heart.

You’ve made a stranger out of me in my own city,
made these hills into pieces of jagged earth left behind
in the aftermath of something terrible that once happened,
jagged like my teeth,
broken on all the screams I have been holding back 
since you silenced me.
cruel boy, 
you made a hummingbird out of a clay heart 
just to set it on fire.
now everyday, I wake up dripping with quicksand sadness.
every night, I dream myself into a little boat,
capsize in the middle of the ocean without a sound,
capsize into my shame,
capsize into the song of the banshee inside my head.
cruel boy,
do you remember when you promised to stay forever,
or was that another flimsy pretty thing I dreamed up?
I see in holograms, unsure of what is real these days,
and I agree, the world is ending,
but why can’t anyone else notice the knife you left in my neck?
I’ve been bleeding for days and days.
darling boy,
I know the world is ending and you won’t turn back,
but I hope you’re okay,
wherever your cruel heart takes you.

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Image credits

Hope everyone’s safe. 🙂

Confessions Of A Fading Ghost.

Listen, I am a ghost, and you cannot convince me otherwise. I haunt the ones I love and that is why they hate me- I’m a reminder of everything good that was actually only rotten all along and no one likes to be betrayed. My honey tears are molten glass and they will sear into your skin to brand you with my curse. If I were a person I’d be the loneliest in the world but I don’t remember my dreams anymore. I don’t think I can dream anymore, except every morning I wake up with a bigger hole in my gut and I am a hollow ghost of once-there-but-fleeting happiness. I tried to love this world but everyone wears the same mask and all my soulmates have eyes a little too hollow except one. This world glorifies ghosts but doesn’t want to become one, and my heart wants to give out on me before I give up on it. My brain abandoned us to our horrors years ago. The chanting in my ears comes from another place, I think it’s trying to call to me, but I’m a ghost and I can only go where the wind takes me. I floated into an anatomy class once and I know all about humans now, except how to become one. I hear they are fond of making homes in one another the way I sink into my quicksand sadness. Atlas needed a break so I agreed to take his place but now my shoulders hurt and my vertebrae are slowly turning into sawdust. If I crumble and fall entirely, the world will fall with me- who will be left to pick up the mess I make?

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Image credits: Shingo Takei, from The World At Night.

On The Outskirts of Heaven

Listen, listen, listen, please, you hear but I need you to listen to everything I’m screaming without opening my mouth, I need you to put aside these games and just listen to me.
Please. Listen before it’s too late.
Beneath these webs we want the same thing. You want me to want you, and I already do.
I swear, just open your eyes and listen. You’ll find me behind the whirlwind haze of glitter that surrounds you.
Here I am, on the outskirts of heaven trying to look straight at you.
Between my rose glasses and your glittering halo there’s not much I can see.
Between my rose glasses and your glittering halo there’s not much to see.
(If only you’d feel.)
If only all these people could get out of our way, then we could be our curtains-down, kitchen-sink selves. I could breathe and you could smile like the world was ours.
Like the world wasn’t ending.
Like we didn’t make so many mistakes that slept on our shoulders while we stayed up at night.
Like we weren’t making new ones every time we looked away.
The ghosts in my city like to count my mistakes out loud, I wonder if you hear their echo all the way to where you are.
Wherever you are.
I wonder if you hear me calling you home.

A Poem For The Boy I’m Not Sure Exists.

I dream of you every night, 

And it’s always the same;

You sneak into my semi conscious brain

With the subtle footsteps 

Of foamy seawaves on a very windy day,

But, that’s okay,

I mean, writing you love letters before I even knew you existed?

I might not know what subtle is, 

But if you open the dictionary to the word that’s the opposite of it, 

You’re gonna find my picture.

See, you visited me one night,

So is it really my fault if I only sleep in hopes that you will maybe once again?

But I only catch glimpses of your shadow here and there,

I chase your footsteps across the ruins of my mind,

And I think I’m only going around forming crop circles in the blue flower fields.

But then, I wake up in the mornings to 4 PM sunbeams, golden and lovely, scattered all over my pillows and on my cheeks,

And really, I think you need to stop playing this hide and seek with me,

Just drop over into my reality the way I drop my pencils all over the place,

And believe me, love, I’ll draw you like it’s the only thing I’ve ever lived for,

Because that’s true, 

And I’ll make you my best masterpiece. 

Just the way you are.

I sleep with the nightlight on these days,

And my father looked at me like he didn’t know who I was anymore the next morning 

After he saw the faint light peek out under my door one night, 

But you change me into someone I never knew I wanted to be,

And I’m here waiting for you with my nightlight on,

In hopes that maybe if you sneak by into my dreams again, 

I’ll wake up with your laughter streaked across my eyelids, 

In hopes that maybe I’ll see it clearer, 

Remember it this time, 

Sew your crescent lips into the dark split seconds of each blink,

Hold it close every time the world goes black.

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Image found on Tumblr.

Come Home.

Forget love,
I will die
If you don’t come home.
You left so long ago,
I have forgotten your face
And your eyes are blurred in my mind now,
But my soul remembers, I swear it does
And it calls for you-
Sings you lullabies to pull you home,
Strews cherry blossoms in the spring
And dead leaves in the winters
To guide you back
To me.
Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten
My voice across the winds,
Don’t tell me you don’t know
Where the golden light leads to
Anymore.
What is it you’ve found
That holds your heart so strong,
You will not leave it to come back home,
What holds you so tight,
The waves cannot bring you back to my shore?
My city is in ruins,
It was only ever made for two,
But I cannot own it alone
And the winds have blown so hard to bring you back to me,
The other half of my city has flown to you too.
What is left of a city when nothing remains?
It only ever belonged to you.
So forget, love,
This city is gone,
These ruins remember nothing;
I would not blame you
If you have forgotten me too
Because I’m in a city that was made for two,
But both halves of it have blown away to you
And I’m left in a desert
Where the earth has never known rain
But it longs for water from what it remembers
Of the ocean that once covered it.
Maybe this is the curse
That comes with my desert city,
That both land and keeper long
For that which has abandoned us.

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Image credits: Matt Lief Anderson

Stars And Smiles.

I’ve been looking for you for so long, my love, and I’m sorry if I can’t see you even if 

(when) 

you stand right in front of me 

because my eyes have been sewn shut so long ago 

I cannot remember how to open them anymore, even when the wire that held them 

lid to lid 

shuttered close

has melted away.

I still only see galaxies painted on the inside of my eyelids

but somewhere between the stars, I once saw a comet tail of your smile 

and I’ve been looking for it again ever since;

I’m afraid if I open my eyes I might never get to see it again.

so I stand here,

eyes closed, face to the sky,

I stare right into the hearts of burning stars 

as I try to find what makes them burn-

I’m not sure if it might not be you.

I mean, I’m not a dying star but I have iron in my veins and doesn’t that mean the same thing if you have been setting my insides on fire over and over again every time your absence dampens it?

so that must mean you exist, right, that somewhere between these swirls of light and color and dark, you really do walk,

tightrope the threads of time between now to then,

that you live, you breathe, you smile and laugh

that it is your warmth that travels through to me,

right across this vacuum of space that swells up 

between my fingers, 

my ribs, 

my spine-

between the empty spaces on my bed that have your name across them.
it all must only mean that you exist, that you’re on your way to me right now,

that fate is weaving around our threads until we will be stories that won’t be told apart anymore, 

so I stand here, eyes wide open but not, and ask

who can blame me for forgetting how to open my eyes and see, when I’m so caught up in remembering pieces of you I know from before,

from when our atoms came together for a brief moment before they were ripped apart again;

even Zeus feared what our love could do to this world.

                                                                                                                                         

Image taken from: Tumblr