dearest X,
i sleep under ribcages which swallow me whole, like hungry mouths that long for the satisfaction of a full stomach, but they have no stomachs, just wicker cages filled to the brim with butterflies.
their rattling bones are spidery and brittle but cage me in like iron bars, made for a prisoner, but i get treated like a god.
it's a shell of honey and scars and the love of the asphalt, and for now, it's still better than the blanket of arms you gave me.
signed,
Heart.
-
you have Atticus' dead shot eyes, but no compassion in your clockwork heart. i used to make fun of you behind your back, saying you wound it up before you went to bed, scared you'd drop dead in your sleep.
and i guess i was right.
you shoot words at mockingbirds and expect them to stay and be shot down, one by one.
except, they'd fly away, and they won't be like those carnival games you'd play with such an earnest will.
[perhaps that was the only thing you were earnest about, destroying clay birds.]
-
your songs are aided by sirens and words that you say, 'don't matter.'
And you spiraled off into a thousand different ballads of love and romance/
death and politics/
and birds which cannot fly anymore, and they should just.
die.
[to be honest, nothing matters anymore, not you or your kaleidoscope of musical notes]
-
tonight, i am under a roof of a silent mirror that claims to be made of only water, and nothing else.
[i know this is a blatant lie, and it is but a polished piece of metal under a blanket of glass.]
tonight, my companions are a wickerbasket filled with notes from my old violin.
and maybe we'll finally learn how to sing.
and the moon is my audience, the stars are my stage lights, and the night sky the veil that covers the stage.
but in the end, i will receive no applause, and I will quite simply,
drown.
-
his book shelves are lined with bottles of goldfish that swim aimlessly in the glass-cells/
lined with fractured plastic hearts and feathers from cranes and swallows and all the pretty birds.
dusted in all the moths that he can place in single jars filled with the crackle of thunder and the burning of something slightly more blinding than magnesium.
and he will try anything that will let him be better than/
a singing bird.
-
he wants his bone marrow.
hollow. scraping. screaming.
marrow.
rip it from his arms.
the crescent moon is jealous of their
everlasting curves.
make blood fill the empty spaces.
hollow. cutting. dying.
marrow.
and he'll sing like
a bird.
because he wants to
(fly like one)
-
i am one in four and twenty blackbirds on a telephone wire.
"have you seen everyone?" the wind asks me.
'no.' i answer, and the wind howls because he has never heard such a lie.
the birds fly away, and their glass throats shatter against the harsh romance of asphalt.
maybe the wind will stop howling someday, but from now till that morning, it's spreading pockets full of rye.
-
To him, I am an experiment.
-
Together we made up the monsters under our beds.
“there’s the dreaded snacklework, with it's
huge, cavernous chest. it breathes it like fireworks.”
‘Under the bed, past the ratty old blanket,
lives a monster that feeds on the dust bunnies and
drags the moon across the sky’
“There’s the Leviathan snake hiding in our old box of bricks
It worms its way from the toybox and onto your pillow,
slithering in your ear, cold and wet”
I kept telling myself you had two hearts just like every other monster, but quite cruelly, you got the second from stealing mine right out of my chest.
(silently, slithering icy and smooth down my throat, into my lungs, making my chest ache,
breaking from the alveoli, into the bloodstream.
And soon enough, you had my heart.)
-
You tried dissecting love like you would dissect a frog, splitting it open, ribcage first, crackling the airy, almost hollow bones that kept me afloat for ever so long, filling them with chemical peels and acids, trying to find out what chemical made flying ever so possible.
Skin peeled back, thumbed, yellow and dirty because of the scratched coarseness of your fingernails,
rusted bolts revealed underneath, a deposit for heartache and poison, the thing that kept me alive, a biological filter for fake love letters and icy shoulders, a little tissue of hope, clinging to all these toxins, you take a sample and you wonder what else it could be used for.
You rip open the tearducts almost carelessly, and fresh saltwater stains form on your white labcoat, and you curse under your breath. You look for gold deposits in its eyes and only find hormones and emotions and tiny little specks of silver and bronze, little traces of being a silver medal, maybe even a bronze one. Never first place, just a consolation prize.
You look behind the heavy metal lungs, above the tummy that hummed with all the butterflies beating in sync, you trace the veins, up, down, left, right, and finally, you reach the place the heart should be. And you find a familiar handwriting, a tattered post-it note.
“I owe you a new heart”
And you remember it as your own words, and it all makes sense.
-
I have a theory, and just saying that makes me feel like it should be coming from your lips.
First, I’m laughing with my friends, a joke tossed into open air, and it causes such a swell of giggles and chuckles.
Second, I have a distant look in my eye, the laughter dulls out, but all their lips are still moving, and you can almost see the joy escape from cherry lips.
Third, I can’t even hear the laughter, and everything blurs a tad, I don’t know what they’re talking about now, but it looks interesting, but I just don’t understand.
Fourth, I wish you weren’t across the room, my thoughts forget to remember, and my memories forget to think.
Fifth, I’m forcing a smile back on my lips, and I pretend like I know what’s going on.
And it’s almost like when you’re there, I’m not.
-
You taptaptap on your clipboard with a pen, glancing at equations like I would with Edgar Allan Poe or Shakespeare
( X= the side-effects of the dissection : X = Poetry - [External Affairs x ‘I fell asleep a kid with buckled bones and a few stray pins in his heart, I woke up a poet, it’s the exact same thing, but with a prettier name’] – [Comparison with Hamlet = Y = ‘To be or not to be’])
“Which came first, the Loneliness or the Words?”
‘I don’t know anymore.’ And you scribble down some most equations.
“But it doesn’t make sense!” I shrug.
You throw the clipboard onto the table and storm out, and I trace Xs and Yx over my wrist.
-
There’s a spirit in the anatomy of my lungs, and it forces breathes
more than the irrational thought of my cells moving on their own.
-
I’m kind of scared he’ll preserve me in formaldehyde, pressing placebos into my throat and swearing to find a cure for the ghost in my lungs.
Or maybe he’ll just throw me away (he wants to be remembered for his successes, not his failures.)
-
What Momma didn't teach
-
His heart was running low of hope and oxygen.
Then, he remembered to breathe, and now he can save a few quarters by only paying for half a tank.
-
Momma taught him how to get the ripest apples from the grocer.
Those that were juicy and red, sweet and crunchy.
It took him a while to find one without any bruises though.
-
That boy taught him about 11:11
And how to wish on airplanes,
He used to pull on his wishbones,
and they snapped down the middle.
All the pretty things in his chest.
Burst and broke
Because his body was too brittle,
And the lovebites were like appleskin
-
Momma taught him what roses smelt like, because daddy
bought roses when she was coughing up blood,
the same day he skinned his knee against the pavement.
Momma and Son, both bleeding, and both asking God
what they did to deserve it.
-
That boy taught him how, even if you chose the ripest apple
you still get the cyanide laced seed.
(baby, even when I was with someone else, all I thought of was you.)
He misses the square of that boy's jaw, and how it
looked across the room, when it was kissing another girl.
from her mouth, to her neck, and then to his lips.
He kind of wished he choked on his appleseedtongue.
-
Momma taught him how to write an epitaph at 14
Daddy was far too busy with the paperwork,
and everyone else was looking at the will.
So he took the initiative.
This wasn't the last thing Momma taught him.
And it definitely wasn't the most useful.
-
He tells his friends he needs a little change, and they dig into their pockets
for quarters and nickels for a new tank of hope.
He smiles to himself because he meant he didn't want to eat apples anymore.
But there was this longing in his stomach, and it was only matched by the longing in his heart.
-
Momma taught him how pretty words were, and it all started with an epitaph.
He needs a pair of hands around his waist, dripping with ink to match his CanvaSkin
And a panting mouth to breathe iloveyou, iloveyou, iloveyou, into his ear, as he's falling asleep.
(Tell me your secrets, and I'll sell you my soul)
-
That boy taught him how love isn't real, because he went back to kissing all those girls in the corner of the bar.
And those broken pieces in his chest, which he kept together with hope, they fall apart all over again.
And it feels almost self-destructive how he loves the feeling,
(baby, there's a cut in cute, and, let me tell you, you're the cutest guy I've ever seen.)
He wishes Momma could be here to teach him how to be Golden, so he wouldn't have to be someone's Silver medal.
listen.
all the words I can say
are played whenever you hear
the rainwater against my acrylic skin
and when you shatter the glass of my fingertips.
-
i.
you know how to make a poet fall in love with you.
you are never supposed to give him roses or tell him sweet nothings.
give him fireflies from your metaphors.
and quotes that make his spine ache with loneliness.
take away his eyes that scream like projectors from a theatre.
rip the words from his mouth, make them your own.
tell him to look for seashells with you,
but make sure the beach is empty,
cause he just wants the passion of having empty hands.
and lastly, make sure you will never love him back.
that is how you make a poet fall in love with you.
-
ii.
you told me to clap if i believe how we're all just fragmented hearts longing for our second half.
and as cliché as it sounds, i fell in love with that thought.
I clapped and you clapped along with me, as we gave applause to starless skies and city lights.
and the possibility of someone to keep us warm.
-
iii.
consequently,
this is something you will never learn to appreciate:
the gentle paws of the fog stretch itself out like
a lazy cat.
and it rears it's head by the open fields and the road i call a
boulevard.
the fog dances with the howl of the wind,
as it shows us that nothing is wrong with the
willows.
they aren't dead yet, they're singing.
singing.
maybe it's the sound of the requiems
of all the crickets
that died,
or the ballads
of the
fireflies
that dip their
liquid wings.
in the
fire of
the stars.
or maybe it's none
of the
above.
-
iv.
you always tell me how i should play a straight game.
no lies.
no cheats.
no tears.
i smiled and told you that nothing is straight,
and if you look closely enough, we're all crooked.
you laughed and pressed my shoulders against the wall.
and you hissed words out of your mouth that
seemed to flow down your citrus lips and pool
at your feet in a puddle.
you told me that i asked too many questions
and that they'd pay a lot for my bones if my
spine was as straight as the
horizon-
somehow, i started crying, and you rolled your eyes and walked away.
after that, your smile was always pressed into
a straight line, but straight lines are crooked,
and yours was just the ghost of a frown
I picked up my keys and walked away.
"Latchkey?" you murmured as we passed another cliché
'Yeah?'
"Could you smile? You seem so sad."
Funny, I was talking to you, Cheshire; your smile was big enough for both of us.
-
"What if it hurts?" You asked
I laughed.
'I thought they said you were the crazy one, Cheshire."
You looked down and for once, your smile was what I always thought it would be.
'But what if it's a mistake?' I said, stealing the words from your candy flavoured mouth.
"The mistakes make everything come to life." This was the Cheshire I knew.
This was the Cheshire who would hurt me.
-
We were both lonely on Valentine's day.
'For you.' I said, placing dozens of roses in your arms.
"Why?" You laughed.
'It's Valentine's Day.'
"But roses don't help."
I nodded and plucked a thorn from a rose.
'Roses never help,' I said as I placed the thorn in your hand.
