i watched in horror as you paced the frigid room over my non-apparent sickness. some nights, i’d scream at the moon until it listened, but my words were not enough. i let a sigh escape from my lungs. it was more than a breath. it was the tendrils escaping my soul. a gasp to end all sounds. it showed the war and suffering of the human disease. the taste of nicotine is condensed, but fluent in the air. i hate it deeply, but the layers of temptation thicken with every falling ash and every fluttering surge of blood. the train tracks are calling and i can already hear the whistle’s blow. i was scared. the thought of perfection dreadfully haunted me. i was not living, but just barely surviving. my soul had rusted to a maroon-colored wisp like the frame of an old mountain bike, on the verge of turning to dust if a mere finger had touched its chain. all i wanted to do was free my mind of whatever had attacked it when i was so young. it's kids like us that are rejected from the world, rejected from our homes. black sheep. we are the empty cracks in the sidewalk that people never dare to get close to, in fear of breaking their mother’s back. when I was little, i saw the bad guys give the brave heroes miasma, but what if the dangerous chemical was inside my mind, all along? i just wanna be a superhero. i asked myself what happened to the alice’s rabbit hole. my self answered, fire. like a wildfire. it stole away my other self like a grave robber. that’s when i knew that the monster was the one who started this. we are elevators that have been permanently shut down in a building as rotten as an apple core. we are dangerous. i don’t wanna be invisible anymore; i’m in the midst of turning into a ghost. i have to deal with these vexations daily. i am continually struggling to keep together branches that demand to grow down different paths, yet i am not a tree. i sit alone, talking to myself. this isn’t yourself. and trying to calm the voices in my head. i don’t know if this is the end. they tear down my wall, allowing what little sanity i had left to skip town before my mental apocalypse. we are the stars that can't be drawn into constellations for our celestial thoughts are too plentiful. we are books filled with rips and tears with slitting spines and fallen pages. we are the cheap lights that've burnt out too soon. we are disappointments. we are the smashed in windows, boarded up with decaying wood and rusted nails. i unlocked the door and slowly crept out like the moon after an elongated ellipse. dear moon, i’m sorry for yelling at you some nights, i know you just didn’t want to be invisible anymore. i looked in the mirror, to see nothing but the monster, standing right in front of me. i allow my eyelashes to gently collide with my skin, diminishing the faces of the monster, because god knows it had more than one. if i close my eyes tight enough, it can’t see me.

i plan on preforming this piece at a poetry reading very soon, but i don't like it yet. i think it has potential, but i don't know what to change. any criticism is welcome. (:

your obituary remains unwritten because i still don't have enough faith in this curse of a mentality to believe that you killed yourself in the first place. you are -- were -- so much more than beautiful. i told you that i always thought that stars looked handsomest when cars passed because the lights reflected their sparkle perfectly. this poem remains untold because i don't have enough faith in this curse of a talent to believe that i could steal a star's beauty straight out of the sky with these words; no one listens to pretty girls, anyway. but oh my god, those stars were so much more than beautiful. i don't know what it was about those stars in particular, but i swear, every single one reminded me of you. maybe it was because of how everyone noticed how alluring they were only when they were dying, only when everyone could see "what they were really made of." maybe it was how our cameras couldn't focus on them long enough to capture the wholeness of their magnificence. i don't know what it was about you, always smelling like burnt wood and beauty, but i could find poems in your fingertips. i still don't know how to write your forever after. i've been in love with you since the day before i learned your name. i learned your name 16 1/2 days before we formally met; it wasn't on purpose. i found it hiding in between the drops of rain falling on the playground. your father had been searching for it in the sandbox. ever since you were little, you had always wanted to be an escape artist; maybe that's why your dad said that loosing you felt like drowning. upside down. you always had room breathe between the raindrops, but he didn't know that. hell, he didn't even know to look for you instead of your name, 16 1/2 days before we met. did you know that the sharpness of his sobbing when he saw your mangled body could cut souls like shards of glass? your last words to me were, "when i die, turn me into a metaphor." you were never supposed to turn into, "learning experience," but you know i was always too busy looking at you to pay attention in history class. what kind of cautionary tale do you think this is? why would you expect death to be fair to you when life never was? in ninth grade, you ripped flowers from their homes for me. i was selfish enough to refuse them because that was the closest i had gotten to gentrification by white boy. i told you that we shouldn't kill things that we think are beautiful, but now that i'm writing this unwritten poem of an obituary, i believe that maybe you confused your reflection for a star; you saw beauty all around you, but never thought to look in the mirror. maybe you allowed that car to shatter 27 bones in your body because you knew that i thought stars always looked handsomest when lit by a car's brights. now that i'm getting around to this unwritten obituary, the only thing i can think of is the last words from your lips. i should have known something was wrong when you told me that you have always been scared to death of living. the news of your suicide carved itself into my bones; it chiselled away at my soul like an arizona landscape: beautiful, until you notice that everything is just shades of the same colour. phoenix can't rise without wings. home is where the heart is, but my heart is stuck in this obituary of a poem, so don't be surprised if i start living in my notebook. come time to your funeral, i filler a vase with faux flowers and sand. i placed it in between the rain drops on your shiny black casket, next to the certificate of the star i named after you. the star i named, "escape artist". i still don't know how to write your forever after.

i was 7 years old, in first grade. my mother asked me not to touch her new earrings because the oils in my hands would erode her jewellery. and that was the first time someone told me that my hands were weapons, capable of destruction. when i was in second grade, we planted sunflowers everywhere. the garden came alive, and even the oldest of trees seemed to smile at us because happiness was an ocean and we were drowning. that was the first time i realised that these hands were powerful weapons, capable of creation. they say that flowers grow when the earth laughs. they will tell you that the world is an imperfect place. they said that the words flying off of my tongue should be clung to an older soul; meanwhile, those same words were singeing the backs of their throats. they told me that i was too young to know that without them telling me first. they will tell you that the world is filled with things so wicked that even the wildest of imaginations couldn't fabricate. i don't know who “they” is. but i do know that my art teacher is nothing like me; she loves poetry. so do i. yesterday, she read us the titles of 37 different poems, all about the galaxy. without merely a pause between breaths, she reads us a quote from some old (probably dead) white guy. it went a little like, “without symbols, the art of literature would be dead; even words are symbols for something.”. she asks our class to draw self-portraits, then multiply them with value to create a 3D effect. it felt like this 2D body was already enough for me, i was still fixing my own atrocity. i can't start over again or else i’ll never finish on time. value times zero still equals nothing. i know she's not a math teacher, but solving me wasn’t very difficult because i was always my own paradox; with either two answers or none. she had the audacity to call me a poem, which didn't make sense to me because i love poetry, but I'd never be able to love something that i didn't acknowledge existed in the first place, like pluto or god. nevertheless, i did not draw her pretty girl face, or pretty girl hair, or pretty girl lips. i drew for her my galaxy, filled with all the planets we refuse to recognise. i never saw one in my own eyes, and i never thought to look in anyone else’s because they say that eyes are the windows to the soul, and momma taught me that it wasn't nice to peep. this milkyway is there only thing that looks like me: so much of everything. it holds the flesh of all we’ll never discover and the bones of everything we will, yet people still deem it empty. when i was in third grade, they told us that we owe our existence to a dying star in the sky. i left class that day thinking that Marilyn Monroe was God. when i was in first grade, i thought quotes were made of pixie dust. my theatre teacher told me that if i believed hard enough, they would make me fly. she told me they were drops of rainwater, and if i let them, they'd seep into my brain. the storm they masked themselves in was just a detour for the thunder in my heart. that's how flowers grow. my art teacher told us to draw pictures of who we wanted to be when we grew up. i didn't know whether to construct a pen or a princess. that's what all my friends were drawing; pretty girl princesses. my favourite princess was ariel, but i never wanted to cut off my tongue for anyone. i guess actions really do speak louder than words; Prince Eric didn't even realise it, but when Ariel lost her pretty girl princess voice, he had been indulged in the loudest of sweet silences. when i was in second grade, we planted sunflowers. they say that flowers grow when the earth laughs. i didn't mean to tickle her with my words, but i never wanted to cut off my tongue for anyone. the sunflowers grew so high, they blocked the sun. they never told me that something so beautiful could cause so much destruction. yesterday, my art teacher asked us to draw self-portraits. i did not draw for her pen, or pretty girl, or princess, or galaxy. i drew for her sunflower because i was young enough to know that the storm would come some day. they didn't know that something so beautiful could cause so much destruction. they don’t know who “i” is.