Icarus can try to tame his heart,
steady the wild beating and
hold tightly to the reins.
Whoever said that he did not feel fear
in those skies was a liar.

It trickled into his mouth,
turning into a thick ambrosia,
one that would make supernovas explode in his heart,
his blood into gold,
turn mortal into a god,
at least temporarily–
invincible enough to draw before the flaming god
in all its fiery anger and grace.

Wax sears soft peach,
and his back becomes trails of blood and white
but at the height of his glory,
he could not care.

His parched throat allows enough
to beg through the blinding agony.
“Help me,” he cries.

(the gods look on as he falls)

the story starts on the roof.
at least, the story in which they both meet
and fall in love–
ah no.

perhaps that’s not the story at all.

the story is but a retelling of the way
that one stumbled into another,
stumbled their way into discovering
the girl on the school roof.
it’s forbidden, you see,
to be up there in all their lonesome.

the story goes:
girl skips class.
boy finds her on the roof.
they talk.
(and maybe fall in love)
but that part comes after.

maybe that’s spoilers for the end of the story,
or maybe it’s just the red herring all along.
writing the plot of a fictional fictional story
as I go along with whatever words come out.

main pairings have always fallen in love
with each other,
and so, yes, perhaps there is this
obsession with them ending up together.
spoiler alert:
they do.
although that’s not where the story starts
or ends.

(they fall in love–
but they love in the way that
they’ve learned to love themselves from each other,
they love in the way that each other
has opened their eyes to a new world,
because there is more to love than just
the romance of two people,
but also in an unexpected friendship in a story
of how a boy meets girl on the roof)

the world is slightly tilted,
off kilter in the most subtle of ways
and perhaps I have always been
the exact same in how
everything seems perfectly upright
up until you take a step back to realize
just how crooked those lines
truly are.

you’ll say that i’ve got a steady hand
but don’t see how the tremors
match the way the wind blows,
how those papers match the countless
indentations in that notebook
I’m always writing in,
how those perfect copies are just
productions from countless drafts
and I have been rewriting myself
so that you can’t take that step back
and see the way those lines have
never really matched up in the first place.

(and for those watchful eyes over my shoulder,
i won’t let you see the way
that i’ve learned to present myself
in the way the world expects me to)

I’ll write my heart out
to the point where
my veins will spill words,
and I’ll bleed at my own hands,
watching as artistry takes form.

After all,
it’s a little too easy to
feel the emotions
you try to keep down
and a little too hard to find the words
to let them go.

(the ache is simply a given
when everything is laid bare)

Today,
I came to a realization that
that there will always
be these missing patches
in my life from the moments
that no longer take shape and form.
Those gaps will be
haunting and yawning stretches of emptiness,
but in others I’ve found the ability
to fill those spaces with more than
just simple resignation
and instead
a desire to live full the life we’re given

(today i learned that
settling isn’t always so bad

you wonder why you’ve
never been happy enough
to be satifsfied,
but perhaps it’s because you never
gave yourself the chance
to figure out the things
that you could appreciate
and be a little more forgiving
than what you’ve been allowing.

(it’s easy to get caught up
in the motions in the
same way that it’s
lose sight of your reflection
when the water all full of
ripples)

If love was a vitamin,
I would overdose,
hoping that it would seep into my system
so much that I could learn
what it’s like to love myself
and find the person that once lived in my mirror,
whose eyes were bright and vibrant
before the world decided to say
that nothing could ever be
as good as it once was.

(how many supplements
would it take to bring me back
to that healthy level?)

“Ring, ring, ring”

I would like to reconnect this call.
It’s quite important.
You see,
life is not so kind as to give time
to the ones who want it,
so before it’s too late,
I need to make amends with
people I never really appreciated for
making me who I am.

I’ve feared disappointment for so long
that I can no longer recall the words to
an apology or even a thank you,
but I still want you to pick up so I can
fix things before it’s too late,
before goodbyes are here and you go away
without me saying
I love you.

“Hello?”

To my first true love:
the words scrawled in aged notebooks.
I’ll look back through
these old pages of mine,
and run my finger along the backside of the paper,
feeling for the pressure and
the frantic way I threw those ideas
onto a page just so I could think straight
without collapsing under the weight of
all the stories I wanted to tell.
perhaps my past self
knew how much I loved this part
of documenting how to be alive
in writing that was never completely
grounded in this inflexible reality.

(this is me finding my love
for the arts again after
being hidden away from the world
so long ago)