Untitled

You were there again.
I woke up uneasy
Haze slowly focusing to my ceiling
I realized it was you again
The dream rushing and tackling my senses
I breathe heavier thinking about our last encounter
You were a shell of yourself
Speaking words that had to travel across oceans by the time they reached me
Stale, motionless, dry, crumbling
Creating dustclouds for me to inhale
Cracked my heart and let it fly into the wind
I had forgotten your ability to bend love and steal moments

You have learned nothing
Let your heart fester with walls and chains
building yourself into another girl's arms
Making old revelations with new kisses
Devising new ways to play cat's cradle with our memories
Hiding behind your facade of invulnerability
You are broken, babygirl
Chipped, fragmented, messy
Weaving your pain under mine

Tell me the truth
Do you still love me?
I see it between the lines of your hesitancy and bravado
Stop pretending we only existed between time
We were real
even with our heavy hearts
We tried to harness moonshines to light our path
Kept swords under our pillows to battle night demons
Built fire between 500 miles that consumed us
Loved each other so fierce that the sun was jealous of our light
Do you remember?

I have suffered breakups that defy linearity
Hearts torn and built back up to be torn again
It's not only the night demons you need to battle
Love yourself to see the ones haunting you during the day
Eating your heart, turning you into another sad heartbreak statistic

I will consume the rest of this hollowness
Rest in pieces until I am ready to forge a new self
One in which I honor us and love myself
Find strength in my pain, using it to grab constellations
that leads back to my core.

freewrite

I see you in exactly 179 minutes. If you are on time, which you are, all the time. You hated tardiness. I was always tardy. Always late. Always scared. Scared to move, unsure of what my heart is beating. I imagine awkwardness morphing into friendship banter transforming into relationship clairvoyance. Or maybe we will just sit there. Looking at each other for answers we already know, confirming our existences were not meant to be aligned.

I still miss you. That is why nervousness is running up and down my veins. I have become stronger in my will but I am still prone to missteps in my heart.

It was a fantasy. The life we were living. The hopes, the dreams, the projections, expectations, the miles between us. All of it shaped us into a hurricane that whipped our love out of us into this amorphous entity in which we have been trying to steal back from.

You threw 500 mph love shots and my plastic nets melted to catch them. I can’t love like a roar, my love’s existence flows like a river and sounds like freedom. There is no more heart when you finished carving my chest. It has internally combusted and mixed with my liver to filter out the toxic between us and reformed to something you can’t hold anymore.

I still love you but I refuse to suffer any more storms. I refuse to sit in the center and watch everything around me spin and tumble out. We have taught, learned, and loved each other and there are no more lessons to learn. School has let out due to hurricane warnings. Time to go home.

raw raw raw

you tore at my heart
until it ripped away
and exposed my rawness

you grabbed at it's messiness
and forced me to feel it
i almost died with all this emotion

and now i am left with nothing
but this wall surrounding my heart
that you once broke

i am a hollow shell
waiting to be cracked
waiting to be filled
waiting waiting waiting
to be whole

i long for your keys
to unlock this fury
of emotional constipation
to ease myself with a shovel
to dig deep deep deeper

lend me your touch again. please.

day 18

you are still here
you are still sitting comfortably on my plush heart
you make demands sometimes but i have mostly ignored you
but yet, you're still here

my plush heart has sunk into my hollow gut
be careful love,
don't get eaten up by the acid

or maybe you should be

maybe...
you should be digested
broken down
nutrients and vitamins sucked out
to fuel my blood stream
to pump my heart full again

to dissolve into salts and minerals
so i can take the best out of you and excrement the rest
let my body digest you
because for 18 days i've been constipated

my heart at a standstill
afraid to beat again
lest it stir up another round of constipated heartbreak

i have taken too many pepto tablets to remedy you
so, please love, get off my plush heart already
i will no longer ingest you.

30/30 - #7

Late!!

Hands slide between thighs
hungering embraces and inhaling desire
All fantasies on the other side
Desperately seeking back the road to you
lead it to my heart and open it again
flush out the baggage and boxes
wipe down all the dust that causes me allergies
and let the sun in and burn all darkness away

It's hard to find me
when I get lost like this
In between daydreams of whatifs, lip selections,
bright eyes, and slender fingers.

I'm trying to run back to you but
it seems that my heart has been captivated
and requires some time and effort to be released
Love isn't always fuller on the other side...

Maybe, I need some time alone
to sort out captivations
label indecisions
and harbor sureness.

30/30 - #6

A butterfly once told me that she could make dinosaurs reappear and then go extinct again with the flap of her tinged wings. She once told me the Universe sent her to fly across faces to remind them of their existence... and hers. She whispered light butterfly secrets into my crackling ears beating on broken drums. Her wings kissed my face as she disappeared into the sun.

My mom once told me she wished to come back as a butterfly in her next life. I asked her why and she got poetic on me. She told me she wanted to exist in a moment of transformation, fly into beauty, and die with quick grace. My eyes swallowed her words along with her soul. It reached down deep inside me, pulling out any doubts I had about her butterfly dreams.

I once dreamt that I crashed my car into a hill and flew into the sky and landed on a shiny saucer. I witnessed infinite earth soaked with light. I shot into the sky and did 360s, witnessing infinite blue meeting infinite brown all coated with infinite light.

They say all things are connected. What if souls attach themselves to butterflies as they flutter in between flowers and faces, ending up soaked with too much sun and absorbed back into the earth? Life would be a series of budding transformations and sunlit tumbles of grace.

30/30 - #5

Battles across miles
You becoming a fireball
Me knocked down, burning.

30/30 - #4

I hear her yelling
spitting frustration out
caused by too much pills
her head splitting open next to her shriveled kidneys
and her heart long lost in the Pacific
from the streets of Chợ Lớn to the paved ones of California urban suburbia

She cleans dog hair out of dirty dog blankets
as she chastises
and chastises
and chastises
and chastises
and yells
and yells
and yells
with all her energy
her pain
her tears
her chronic splinters
her undying love contradictions
so I can finally hear her

But I don't.
All I hear are pins thrown at my cushioned heart
Sucking it in and if I move it might pierce deeper
So I stop moving.
I stop listening.
I walk away pin-full.

30/30 - #3

LATE POST. Blame it on being at my parent's house.

I felt it last night.
Felt the waves of light course through my skin
leaving it tingling

I saw you with swords
cutting up snakes poking out of holes
I thought of your success

I sent you my love and wings
and hoped both guided you back
to rest
and to me.

30/30 - #2

My stomach has devoured my heart
kept it hostage at the gut level
and squeezing it tightly with the occasional acid coating

My breathing is too shallow for freshness to reach my heart
so I gulp air like fish gulp for water on the chopping block
Hoping hiccups will bring back my heart to an even keel

How do you ever heal broken hearts?
Maybe, it's haphazardly jammed with repression and amnesia
or maybe, time layers it so thick it suffocates
or maybe, we just never forget and own many hearts
so we keep each broken one in jars
labeled with times and dates of injury leading to
punctures, ruptures, splintered, disjointed,
love fragmentations

I keep my jars on a mahogany shelf
Polish it with nostalgia
I kept your jar open though
because I'm still trying to glue it back
replacing doubt with sunset drives
renewing smiles with kisses
remembering close tenderness instead of hazy fight tones
I'll keep it open until it expires
until it evaporates into love essence heaven
until I can regurgitate my heart back onto my sleeve.

30/30 - #1

I think I'm going crazy.
Nighttime bugs chitchat breaks into my heart
Reminding me of loving smiles and smiling eyes
down chasms that widen each time I breathe.

I wake up hazy,
trying to glue sticky heart pieces back together
with long-gone kisses and distant sunshine.

inspired from a night out in SF 11/6/09

city lights and slippery streets
madonna classics and brown beards swaying
beauty bar bursting with skinny jeans hugging white hipsters
six steps away lies a closeted bar
traditional african hang out infiltrated by mocked fedoras and terrible spastic dancing
hodge podge of forced space sharing
with perplexed black faces and wanna be black white faces
dancing to slowed down MIA beats so their hips can catch up
witnessing white people dance to anything remotely brown
brings images of monkeys trying to act human
clumsy, awkward, and dangerous

Golden

I throw a basket of dirty untruths at you
ignorant of its mark
Hoping to stir deep heart fluids
around and around so that it spills onto your skin

Amnesia always strikes me when it's the most unneeded
Forgetting your forced choices
and growing up ill-fitting to this golden skin color
Forgetting the lack of models to tie yourself around

You cry silently for me to stop draining your heart
because you didn't think you had enough in the first place
to power your way out of confused desolation
It took me jumping so high into the air that I hovered
over your herstory to see the red flags of victory and the white ones of struggle
spread across your short 21 years

I look at my body and see the same flags,
stuck in one way or the other
but now instead of poles and cloth, they're just holes and dots
It's easy to empower amnesia when judgment rules over empathy

I stand before you with hidden struggles and slightly translucent scars
ready to wait with you on mountains
ready to attempt to redefine and reword national anthems
ready to believe in something bigger than God
and ready to hold you tight reminding you that love transcends broken pipes.