Memory of lovely bruises

I had travelled the secrets of her surface
She knows this
Like sunrise
Her eyes fill with sunlight
Alabaster skin is marred with bruises
She saw this morning and she remembered
That into the silence of the night
There were stars where our bodies intertwined
Where shifting innocence rushed out
There was a whisper of Amen, she exhaled
She had looked up to the heavens in prayer
Eyes wide and set alight
Hands clenched with an anaconda grip
Her voice had sung octaves
She remembers
That like a dam breaking loose, like gushing rivers
Her blood, her soul, her essence filled my mouth
Yes she definitely remembers
That I had suckled, that I took pale skin between my teeth
That I had given her love and passion
That I had given her
love bites

(Author’s Note: This poem actually comes from my poem “Love Bites”, which I have not posted here yet, written backwards as well as slightly modified. This is just me trying to fulfill the last challenge of NaPoWriMo [http://www.napowrimo.net/] which is to write a poem backwards. Not really sure if I did it right but it was kind of fun to revisit an old poem of mine. Cheers to the end of National Poetry Month! And may we celebrate poetry everyday of our lives)

An Artist’s Job

Before I paint, I like to hold the stick between my lips and into my mouth
As if it were a cigarette
And I inhale the smell of paint
It is alive, it is addicting
And it is telling me to make something beautiful
And so I do

Before I write, I like to hold the pen’s tip against my skin
As if it were a syringe
Pretending to suck my blood in and mix it with ink
I can feel the red blood cells rushing to meet the pen
It makes me feel alive
And it is telling me to make something beautiful
And so I do

Before I take a photo, I like to just stare into the viewfinder
As if it were a telescope
And I look for the most intricate details of my subject, like looking at stars
I want to see all of its starlight before I capture it
It is telling me to make something beautiful
And so I do

Before I make love to you, I will hold you close to me
As if you were a blanket— No
Not as if you were a blanket, or a syringe or anything
I will hold you close to me as you are
You smell wonderful
There is no pretending here, the blood cells rush to everywhere our skin touches
I have always seen your starlight
And I don’t need to make you beautiful
Just like I never made my paintings or my writing or my photographs beautiful
They are beautiful for the very reason that they exist
And so are you
And so no one tells me to make something beautiful
Because an artist’s job is to uncover everything that is beautiful
And so I do

Haiku #2

The stars are shining
They are breadcrumbs for those lost
In this universe

Haiku #1

A cold breeze passed by
It whispered your name softly
I still have goosebumps

(Author’s Note: It is my first time writing a haiku so I am unsure if I did well. Nevertheless I find it fun and interesting hahaha)

Morning brings another day

If you think about it, sunrise really isn’t about the sun rising
Scientifically, that would be pretty wrong
No, it’s more about the Earth spinning
Spinning on its own axis
We can’t really blame the Earth for wanting to see everything around it all the time
The universe it inhabits is beautiful
We see that
We see the sun rise, and the sun set
We see the opacity of the sky change as the moon blocks the sun
And it begins to show the stars
This is day and night
Always the same process

But not for us
Not for the people here on the ground
Sunrise and sunset means beginning and ending of a day here
“The sun will rise again”, they’ll tell you
It is the same sun, but never the same day
Who you were yesterday, changed today
Your hair has grown a millimeter, your nails as well
You see stars differently

I used to raise my hand in kindergarten when the teacher asked a question
And when they called my name, I would loudly say “I don’t know!”
It’s a running joke here in my family
But why do we keep telling it?
I am not that person anymore
No I didn’t run from it
I raised my hand in the air and passed that memory unto the sun
So that it may set with it, knowing that the next time it rises it will no longer be the same
I am not that person anymore
I no longer walk this Earth ignorant and uninformed
I am no longer a child either

But I am no longer who I was yesterday either
I am no longer the boy that had his favorite bacon and eggs breakfast
No longer the boy who was less informed
No longer the boy that saw that sun rise
That sun has already set hasn’t it? Today is a new day

It’s my belief that we are who we are at that exact moment
And maybe we will never be the same again and maybe we will
Maybe the stars will never be as beautiful and maybe it still will
The universe is only what it is at an exact moment
The tree of life only grows till death
It rises up and then sets itself down when it is over

The sun has risen and set today
Tomorrow I will rise with the sun
And I will no longer be the same
I will be better

The self-danger in self-doubt

I’m scared because sometimes I have so much to say
But not nearly enough that will hear
or listen
I’m scared because sometimes I have so much to show
but no stage to stand on
and no audience
I am scared that sometimes to get attention there is a pay
What is the cost? Is it my money? My car?
My labor? My words? My soul?
I’m scared because what if I don’t have enough to give
What if I can’t pay?

– – –

I’m scared because of how much I seem to be willing to sacrifice
To be heard by people that will always be strangers to me
I’m scared because of how much I chose to blind myself
to the crowd that was always beside me

Sirens

There was a pull to crawl to my demise
To let myself feel helpless inside

And I was high, I felt no fear
Drunk on a song that only I could hear

The Act of Greeting

We stand outside your house, both with cold feet and the winter having nothing to do with it

“I—”
“I—”

We both freeze and just look at each other. Yet another similarity to add to the list tonight:

– Goes to the same school
– Friends with the same people
– Both in the same neighbourhood
– Both best friends with each other
– Same line starters

She laughs “I’m sorry. Thanks for taking me to that cool bar. I had a lot of fun tonight. Especially the game of darts” she giggles

I scratch my head, smile sheepishly and flush a little. Ah the game of darts. Where the two things needed are the dart and your attention. Mine was on her, and so the dart naturally flew into someone else’s…food. Thankfully.

“Yeah I’m not sure we’re seeing it from the same perspective”

“I don’t know. I mean it was pretty funny”

“Ha ha. For you of course”

We laugh until it dies down to just smiles directed at each other. When it is winter, you immediately take notice of the next thing that makes you warm. Of course my attention would be directed towards her.

She clears her throat and I know this is it again. She’s going to say goodbye, turn around to go inside, and the next morning we will be…best friends.

We feel unfulfilled when we know there is still more space to fill.

She will raise her hand to wave goodbye, and then I. Just as we always do. I find another similarity, which is her hand and mine. Maybe it’s because we’re around each other so much. Maybe because I’ve held her hand in and for comfort so many times that our pain has shaped them to be the same. Maybe it’s because they seem to reflect each other during moments like this. When she waves goodbye, I wave goodbye. Our hands are reflections of each other.

She waves her hand and says “goodbye, I’ll see you tomorrow kay?”

But she doesn’t wait to hear a confirmation. She doesn’t wait for my hand to lift. She must already know what it would look like, just by looking at her own hand. The marks of veins, straining to keep our hands from lifting. I find the marks on mine are already too many. It hurts. There doesn’t need to be anymore hurt.

At that moment I took my chances. You can only wave goodbye so many times before your hand forcibly reaches out to grab them by theirs. Before you pull them to turn around and finally let your eyes see the maps your hands can make together. The roads only make sense when you can see the whole picture.

“Don’t wave goodbye to me, our hands don’t have to hurt each other anymore” I pleaded

Her eyes were starting to well up. She was pleading too. “You’re my best friend; you have seen what they can do. I don’t want to hold things I might just drop”

I shake my head “Don’t you see? You’re always going to have to hold things. Won’t you rather struggle in love than struggle in pain?”

“We can’t—”

“We were meant to be here”

“You don’t know tha—”

“My hand interlaced with yours is how I know. I haven’t been reading misleading signs, there was a map and I saw the two of us build it together. Each time I held your hand for all the moments of our lives. Each time we felt invincible and each time we felt scared. We taught them how to hold each other; we crafted the puzzle pieces to make the puzzle. This…isn’t a mistake” I shake my head “It’s not”

She looks at our interlaced fingers, her eyes tracing the way they interlock, like roads and highways. Only we know how to read them.

She looks up at me, and then turns around quickly, and I panic because I can’t take this anymore. Panic so much that I didn’t notice that she had been dragging me with her.

“Wait—”

“You’re right” she turns around to look at me and only do I notice that for once, when she turned around, she took me with her.

She smiles a little and says “Our hands don’t have to hurt us anymore. Tonight we’ll teach them how to love each other”

I start to smile, and then grin “How are we going to do that?”

“By teaching them how to wave hello of course” she winks at me

Hello. I like it. It implies meeting up. It implies the start of a journey. It implies looking at the map in our hands and finally following the rest of its directions.

“Hello it is then”

She giggles “Hi there”

I grin back “Hey”

Hello indeed

Statistics

It’s difficult to be a statistic, I realized
Everything, from which sleeping pattern you take, to how you wake up
Is just cold hard data for their next pie chart
We are lab rats to life, asked to run into the field covered in foil
To see if the thunder will hit us
We are only information

Funny how we made categories for everything in this world
Clean, Dirty, Good, Bad, Pretty, Ugly, Gay, Straight
Convinced that these are merely for organization
The word organize means to create a coherent unity of individual things
Yet when we ended up with more than one thing
Humanity is supposed to be Pangaea but our tremors broke it apart

You get to a family reunion and they tell you, you gained weight
They ask you if you’ve been getting rest just because of a little unrest
They tell you they’ll get you a comb next time because your hair doesn’t look right
As if there was a rule book on how your hair, or the rest of you should look
We become so transfixed on details we forget it is only the tip of the iceberg
We give titles to our best people which is okay
but we leave behind those below to be uncategorized
You have to grow wings to have worth
We only know how to look up

Standards only matter when you accept them
Why do we succumb to the barriers when we made them in the first place?
You can’t wait for someone else to jump over the hurdle first
You will lose that way
And when glass shatters you can’t wait for other people to pick it up
Why increase the chance of hurting?
If you’re going to bench press, make you sure you can carry your responsibilities
When you do nothing, you allow the space to be filled with something else

It’s difficult to be a statistic, I realized
But to be a statistic for humanity itself doesn’t seem like a bad idea
Where you can only be categorized for how much you loved, and how sorry you are
How fragile you can be and how brave
For how much you learned, how much you lived
For how human you are
Maybe then, the numbers will mean something

More than just an Adjective

I can’t just call you beautiful, that is not enough
You’re not this artwork plastered to the museum walls
I will not take one glance at you, call you beautiful and turn to the next painting to do the same
You have to understand you are more than that

You are not just beautiful, you are a track runner
Your feet will always be moving, I cannot stop to admire you
I have to run beside you and come with you to the places where your smile will be sunrise

There is nothing routine about you and yet there is a pattern I recognize
Like the cosmic background radiation, your ancestry is flowing in your veins
I can see their beauty too
Your starlight now, comes from your forefathers but that’s okay because you are your own frequency

I cannot just call you beautiful, there is a minimum word count and it never stops growing
One word will not suffice, I cannot describe you and be done with it
You are more than just an adjective
I have to tell your story
about how you are a growing person learning the art of overcoming
How you are unable to commit to be a full vegetarian, how you failed tests too
How you are scared, how you are teaching yourself to be brave
How you are teaching me too
I do not have the money to print that all on paper, but I can give the time to tell your story
Because I can’t just call you beautiful, that is not enough

I need to have made an epic out of you, like Achilles
Of the girl, the heroine, who was invincible
And broke barriers, who fought the war against hate
But had a fragile heart, one that no armor can ever truly protect
Because that is more than beautiful
That is human