you said it's sad

stacks of poetry

unread

i'm losing track

tear me open and hold it back

bleeding onto sheets of paper

gives you stains and specks

you may like to listen now

but if i were a playlist

you hadn't heard most of it yet

and i doubt that you like

every song that i hold

or word that i wrote

more than the courage

i lack

feeble candles burn themselves out to death,

(hard cold flesh burns and reeks

in their motherly warmth)

and bury themselves in blue fondue.

someone picks them up gently between two fingers

and harshly throws them away.

(there's something nauseating about dead candles)

somewhere, a song stops playing.

somewhere, the evening ends.

they adjust their dark coats and shake my hand,

the lights are slowly departing.

my history teacher says communists are dry and

so is their history and i spit on the ground.

(and so does che).

young blood spills on rough concrete.

yellow leaves fall from the sky onto my terrace

in the night like ill crows

and whisper to me that autumn

is almost here and i cry myself to sleep.

yellow leaves never lie.

august passes away quickly

and i mourn for it sometimes.

(in a dream, i walk over august's dead body,

and it waves back).

pretty pretty words were strangled

inside my throat and trampled under heavy feet

(i hear them shaking like broken glass

sometimes)

in moist july nights.

september promises to be harsher.

this time, there is a finality with which

dark coats are adjusted and hands shook.

the lights are slowly departing.

my eyelids scrape down your forearms pooling with jasmine perfume against your wrists, in a burning gaze. tangible. you first kissed me when the snow ran red, like blood, or like the ground was blushing through its permafrost at my glee, at your palm against my hammering chest. i had pulled away first, soaking your hair with a handful of tar-streaked slush as you squealed. it was as if the thawing road shied away from our soaked high tops, licking at the opposite snowbank. my first kiss. it was nothing short of perfect. that was . . . your voice, curled up at the end like a boot crunching leaves, told me everything. i kissed you again, on the cheek.

the next time was in the lake that spring, our parents talking, sipping cocktails, as we jumped off the dock at your lakehouse again and again. your swimsuit hugged your hips, rivulets of water skating down your legs. you giggled nervously as my eyes landed on your grimy feet. —the weeds coat the rocks. algae. wanna try to touch the bottom?— and we leapt into the freezing water, gripping each other’s thighs with icebound fingers, oversaturated lips meeting with a sigh. you inhaled sharply and swam up to the surface, coughing. you burst into laughter, i remember, when i showed you my toes, clenching at the slimy soil i scooped from the seafloor. you grabbed my elbow and pulled me back under.

month after month, your tears of joy and pain water the valleys in the crook of my elbows as i soothe you. my laugh, bubbling and laced with sunbeams, sheds light on the dark parts of you: the negative space between your shoulder blades, your liver, the sadness that sometimes creeps out from behind your corneas. call us symbiotic, but this is not your average science lesson. there are no taxidermied fowl in this museum. your ribcage, a venue. your laugh, a treasure. me, a docent, who walks your halls, in awe day after day.

every good book ever written goes unread,

fixtures on shelves, painted faces upheld

holding words they know no eyes will see.

we can’t all exist for the ages; the scrolls have no space. some of us were built for the here and now: for firework shows and the baby that has never seen so many sparks in their life, for brushes of touch that last a second or less, for phone calls and pictures never taken. some of us have the luxury of a judgement-free life. we get messy and it’s ours to deal with, no one else.

i retrace my old path,

larger footsteps impress on yielding ground

and i think i saw a glimpse of who i used to be.

I do not need to see you to have you always on my mind. Always in my thoughts, always in my head, always on my mind. Your name is eternally on the tip of my tongue, escaping my lips in the witching hours, whispered into my pillow and floating into the night. Except -- what is your name? I sense that from day to day you stray further from yourself.

Love, surely you will have priority in the workhouse due to having been there before these floods of people? Your life seems to me to be nothing more than misgivings after misgivings. I have also had little time to write these days, George is becoming busy with business, and this presents me with an idea -- he is on a trip next week, I will become head of the house for at least a short while... come and visit me, darling. I will ensure you will have a clean set of clothes, warm bath, and rich food.

As the candles dance together and taunt me with their togetherness, I yearn for the next occasion we can be together. And I will make it so.

Do not lose hope, J. I lose myself each day in the stories of the constellations and the whispers of the stars, each reminding me of how unique you are, and how glad I am to be with you, in spirit and in soul.

I would not compare us to that of a burning flame, more of liquid wax, we melt and then reform. We adapt, and I admire this of us. I do not care if you are James or if you're Josephine, you will always be the second half of my heart.

This page is so bare as my head is too full of thoughts, my conscience is falling into a whirlpool that never ends, and I have too many thoughts to even begin to articulate. I apologise for this, but know one thing, Jo.

In the starkest way I can put it to you, I will not dilute;

I love you.

Lila.

where does the pain go? you ask, all that hurt you carried.

I haven’t slept soundly in days;

it hurts and hurts and hurts, burrows into the marrows of my bones.

it goes, I answer, it never stops moving.

you remember the long nights, where the fire burned cold.

all that fear, and the tears that salted the earth behind us;

hope had no place there, at the end of the world.

only duty carried us forward.

do you dream, still, of something better?

I want to laugh. I haven’t laughed in a long time.

dreams are for people not weapons. you should know better.

you are still and small where you were once so bright.

you are worn down now, where you were once a child.

the dark scares me, you admit.

i fear the light, I whisper, it reveals too much.

what was once a sign of safety now shows no mercy.

in the dark, monsters can hide.

in the dark, monsters can lie to themselves.

a kind world lets monsters be monsters;

a cruel world makes monsters understand monstrosity.

how did you survive it?

i didn’t really have a choice.

but who saves you? who saves me? who saves us?

these are all the same question, and so they have the same answer:

No one.

i thought of you in technicolour: bright eyes,

slow dance, all neon. took a stroll on the riverbank

& prayed for release like i used to. rust took its

time to settle but the old can be scraped off, just like

that. found a stone bench & paused to let midnight

rattle my bones—to let the cold silence inject some grit

into these soft muscles. blamed myself for not picking up the phone,

realised i never wanted to anyway. followed the streetlights home:

traced every crack in the pavements, thought about my mom

for the first time in months. i guess hurt shows up

wherever it wants to. still, this misery holds steadfast.

listened as the dark grew around & the neon flickered

just the slightest—recovery leaves a bitter taste

so i let the ache wash it down, just like that.

and the trees on the hillside clung to each other by the tips of their branches and leaned toward me, waiting, watching; but maybe i'm just vain maybe that's the human in me / when i think trees are capable of love and loss because they're certainly capable of life; and when i see the bay for the first time in a while i want to jump because i know i will fly, i will waltz above the glossy water and dive with the little white birds that blend with the foam on the tops of the waves like the whipped cream i made that morning and the pancakes that sit in the freezer because no one ate them. and that's probably too much to say in one sentence but i don't care and neither does jack kerouac even though he didn't age well, and when the sky turns to pastel ombre like the strokes of my grandfather's paintbrush i can see emily dickinson's brooms sweeping in the night and the bonnets of children playing in eternity. at first i see the glimpses of golden like a rainbow droplet scattered by the sun and then the waves come, a wash of gilded air and gleaming glass, something to love for. the mountains blink humbly as they turn a deep purple and the windows reflect like old memories that have been polished and hung up on the wall. and i look at the photographs and paintings and sketches and i remember. and i swing dance by myself above the water to clairo and phoebe and hunt for pride flags on the sides of houses but i don't forget anything, and neither should you.

tell her i was the one greater wronged of the two of us, & then

kiss her by the knuckle in my stead. i lie because i love.

i looked because i loved. what is love, if not a glance over the shoulder?

i was unshakeable, i was invincible. but you were my crux; you were my undoing.

& trust is no pomegranate pressed to a palm, it is a gate weakly held open for

the two of us, and the expectation not to run. & it is not that i do not trust you,

my love, but i cannot trust any light of the sun that you never saw first. i held

your return above the sins of gods and men, & it was my mistake, but never

you. never you. my faith was only ever you. i believed in your hand clasped tightly

in mine more than i did so in death itself, & i regret only the price you paid for it.

so let us both be specters, then. let us love better this way. this is our reversal, this

is my devotion. i follow you, this time, into a great unknown. so be brave. look behind.