you’re a star gazer darling,
but you’ve never pretended to
know the direction you’re headed,
never tried to pretend that you
could place names to faces as easily
as you could point out
the constatellations in the sky
and spill their stories from your lips as if
you were present for the beginning and end
of all their myths.

things have grinded to a halt,
but even so,
you’ll keep revolving somehow,
finding ways to look up at the
pitch black of the sky
and still see the light
in everything

(you’ll look up and miss
the steps if you’re not careful
darling)

it’s something out of a movie:
you’ll smile, move in closer,
whisper a line that i know we’d both
laugh at, even if it wasn’t funny,
and i’d lean in
as if a puppet on strings,
except strings are red ribbons the directors
wanted to use for
“symbolizism”,
and suddenly everything is
picture perfect.

only this isn’t a picture,
and we’re only acting out
the motions

(they never do show the
behind-the-scenes)

close the door behind you
when you leave,
it’s too loud here and i’m just but
someone who wants to travel away
from the noise and tedium
as if i could flea and escape whatever
mess i’ve left behind me.
those warning signs,
bright yellow against the shiny floor,
does nothing for the way that i’ve
slipped and fallen from one problem
to the next.
i shouldn’t be the problem,
because i didn’t choose to be the subject
of a picture of a great divide,
i’m not a yawning canyon that you can
just hope for a bridge,
when that space has existed for as
long as it has.

(i don’t know what you’re expecting from me,
this gap will be here,
and i’m just trying to leave
before it widens)

sometimes I think that poets are grandmasters of art in the making. do they hold the history of other poets in their bones? do they hold the heavy pasts of other artists in each fibre of their being? they’ve been broken, and yet in those broken places, there has always and forever been liquid gold seeping from their pores. they’ve captured bits and pieces of the essence of humans. how do they do that? their words are like the paintings in the Lourve, but no one would frame words, not in the way they frame moments and it just– it makes me wonder how they’ve carved out a piece of the sea (the vast ocean of language itself) to convey their meanings into the shores.

if you tried hard enough,
i’m sure the words that you’re trying
to force down my throat
will make its way down,
settle uncomfortably in my stomach
the same way it always has.
i’ll carve it out of the hollows,
make sure that it comes out
from where it came from,
hold a mirror to your face and ask
where the hypocrite is.

(there it is. don’t you see? there it is.
you’re wearing the face)

you drew this line so firmly into the sand,
as if you were trying to etch marks
into concrete instead of
making these boundaries temporary.
the marks would have washed away
if you chose to draw them into those
ever shifting grains but it seems as if
you’re firm on making it clear
that you were never going to
reach across this line
ever again

(your eyes have become icy,
and your words are without volume)

i didn’t think that the quiet
would feel so big and awkward
in my hands that have grown used to
holding heavy things.
it’s not that i’m uncomfortable with the silence,
but rather,
that the silence will only stretch on
if i do not fill the time with something
more than the walls around me and
the tantalizing sky outside.
it’s not lonely, not yet.
and i doubt it will ever be lonely.
this doesn’t stop me from wondering
who i’ll be when i come back
(something tells me i’ll have changed,
but not neccesarily
grown)

here, a little over a week until march 23: i’ve long decided that i would stop writing daily after a full year because it truly is easy to burn out. it’s been something i’ve turned into a habit, but i don’t want writing to ever feel like a chore to me. to prove something to myself, i made the commitment of writing this for a year. i’ll save the long speech for next week, but i suppose i did want to give a heads up to the few that follow this blog (a huge thank you for supporting me)

and so it begins:

in a twisted way, my musings of homeschooling have come true. the world, as it stands, is falling apart as much as it is desperately trying to stay together. social media is a spinning coin, one side spreading knowledge faster than ever, and on the other side, that knowledge brings fear and hatred. on the clock, stay vigilant. careful of people, careful of friends, careful of the shadows on the grounds. stay careful. everything begins to come to a halt, like some ferris wheel in the summer coming to a stop at the end. only– we’re stuck at the top of this wheel, and there’s no safe way down. at least not yet. i’ve seen the word “virus” so many times that it’s lost its meaning to me. like when you mumble a word so many times that it becomes shapeless, senseless. the ones on their last stretch find themselves at a gap in the track, unable to keep running towards the finish line. they wait, and know that their future gets a bit farther with every passing day.

here it is, the thief of the modern world.

(and it has stolen much)

They called the power in his step something akin to fireworks, the way he pops and crackles with every move. An explosion of power, it could be called. But if you only took one second to see him at his worst, you’d realize that it was not fireworks at all. He fought as if he were metal chains that scraped the floor, a heavy weight that locked his opponent down with fear, coiled around them and struck with deadly force. One that would not surrender to the wear and tear of life so easily. It wasn’t beautifully choreographed or elegant, but rough rash movements that could have seemed almost desperate if it weren’t for the fact that desperation always led to death. He didn’t look like he was dying.

If anything, he came alive.