It is the present no one wants
The unopened package
An uncomfortable silence
In a room full of people

Funny how I have convinced myself
The love I offer so freely
Not wanted,
Not needed

The intimate act of showing the one you love your unfinished art says to them:

“Like my unpolished heart, I trust you with this.”

Dear reader,

Will you sit with me in silence,

When my words no longer work?

I prefer paper over people
Unwavering in its patience
Never questioning my motive
Seemingly uninterested in my feelings
Requiring no answer or explanation
Content to listen  

And so it goes
One day your words will no longer work
Time spent prioritizing paper over people
It listens but refuses to make a sound

Wading through the morass of obligation

I tend to the fallow fields of being  

And like a tree from which we gather no flowers

Sad has been this life

Fated to produce no fruit

Perhaps I deserve to be penalized
For everything I do
Instead of being loved by myself,
And you.

I can watch you from afar, because it doesn’t burn

You are as foreign to me as the stars

And just like them you have the insolence of setting me on fire when I get too close

Consider the oceans–
Bright and shallow, dark and dangerous.
The tide turning quickly and without warning.

Not much would change if I said this were about
people.

For absent friends
For each promise broken
For every dream that won’t come true
For the harm I have caused and now regret
For the pain I have inflicted upon you
For love I will handle your sins,
In justice I will show you mine.

Each person I have ever met
Has added to the tapestry of my soul
Some adding a single string
To the complexity of the whole

Sometimes strings lie in disarray
Their edges frayed at threads end,
The ghosts of my memories left behind
Woven into the fabric of my being  

To move forward
I face the torn edges of the past
And make peace with the imperfections
Added from each thread,
By integrating them into myself

When your roots are shallow
The slightest breeze
Can blow you away

Often times,
I have no words for my emotions
Often times,
I cannot articulate my sadness
And how it consumes me
Entirely

I am thankful for each goodbye spoken to me

The most painful are never said,

Never explained

I’ve often been told I’m too uptight

Little do they know,

Each day I make a cup of coffee

A display of quiet anarchy,

For it too is an act of entropy

I am well practiced in the art of heartache
Fluent in the language of grief
Versed in the routine of melancholy

I walk through this life marred by loss

Each day representing my triumphant victory over every obstacle existence has thrown at me

Does an apology ever bring anyone back?
Can it?
Or are we all just grasping for an answer,
To explain the finality of it all,
As deep as it cuts,
As shallow as the words feel.

Little one,

You are resilient, you are compassionate, you are generous, you are brave.

You are so much more than your lovely bright eyes and mischievous smile.

You are hopeful and stubborn. Surprising and curious.

You have too long loved those who thanked you for taking up so little space.

You were made for more.

You are ready for more.

Ask for more.

It robs me of my words,
It is the mirror in which I look,
And no longer recognize what I see.
Who was it we were fighting all along?

Perhaps it was me?

Is forgiveness something that could be mine?
To very notion akin to trespassing,
This luxury which I seek.

Dear Reader,
You once promised
That we would sit in silence
When my words no longer worked.

I must go now.

I assumed there is poetry
In death and the wilting of flowers
In the setting of the sun
In a life with or without words to describe

I assume there is art
Not just in the portraits we burn
But in the dark and hollow nights
Determined to find beauty in the black and grey and white.

I assume there too is music
In the pouring of clouds
In footsteps
In the abandoned and lost

I bring you the burden of my longing
I am the wanderer without drink
And you are the pool of water
In my desert of desire.

I bring you the burden of my love
It has waited for so long-
(And there is no crucifixion like waiting)
It shall cover you-
It shall be the girdle of flame around you
It shall be the pyre
Whereon we shall perish

Sometimes,
I feel like an assortment of people
Who never existed
But wanted to,
All at odds with each-other
Over matters of meaning,
Our purpose in life,
The nature of love.

Each one clamors for my attention

Your anger is valid. Your intensity is welcome.

Feel that fire for as long as it wants to be there.

Anger is a great teacher.

Stay there and only when it feels right to you,

Set it free.

I will listen to you in your anger and marvel at the brilliance of your heat.

Is love quantifiable?
Is it about plunging the world into darkness
Ripping the veil that separates us from heaven
And displaying the entirety of the cosmos
That exists for your express enjoyment?

Is love about grand gestures?
Draining the very seas
And telling you it cannot be measured
Endless like the grains of sand

Is love found in the quiet and still?
In the timid motions of a shy heart
Struggling to beat its pain away?

Come see this menagerie
The traumas and fears which once steered me
Put on display and stored behind glass
Like wild beasts, for you dear reader to see

I compare you to an old injury
Like those maimed by war
Or survivors of natural disaster
Something to be endured

I struggle to reconcile the conflict in my heart
Because in both times of war and peace
Heartbreak is the same

My single greatest fear,

Is that this has all been a series of mistakes,

I will never be able to unmake.

For every great artist with a closet full of bad paintings,

There is one with only skeletons.

I live for the pain you bring me. I craved the feeling of being let down by you, because in some way it means we were close enough for you to hurt me.

We tend to ruin things
On purpose or not---
Including each other.

Like Icarus
Too close
Too much

You’re no longer here,
But I still write you all these poems
A heartbreaker that breaks their own heart
Is that too a form of art?
Laid bare for your dissection,
Do you gain any form of satisfaction,
As to why I have never offered objection?
It too is a chain

Pain had a sort of beauty until it became my own.

Pain was the material which became poetry when it was irrelevant to me.

Now I have pain stored in me that couldn’t be turned into poetry.

There was nothing poetic or beautiful about how I have endured.

Pain that is brutal and poisonous.

Pain that forces me to close my eyes and shut my ears in denial.

Pain that swallows my words and suffocates my silence.

Pain that strangles the ink and turns into blood on my paper.

Love had a sort of beauty until it became my own.

People have always been people

I lived
I loved
I made something
I laughed
I cried

We’re exactly the same

Please do not forget me

I revel in the ways it haunts me,
revere the phantoms and fables
burned into my soul.

I make love to memory, in starless witching hours, when I am too cold, too quiet, too empty

Likewise, weeds splitting once-opulent walls, the dullness of rusted jewels— the primal truth in the certainty of loss.

I think of you often and I don't reprimand myself over it anymore. I've convinced myself that I occupy your thoughts just as much you occupy mine. That you too miss the friend you once had. That, like me, you know how inelegant and stupid our untangling was. Perhaps this is the only form of communication we have left.

I can’t convert this pain into something positive.
I refuse to pass it on.  
I grasp at it doggedly,
Like a rock that drags me to the ocean floor.

I thought I was done with this pain

And yet,

I am burnt to ashes

Only an elegy could illustrate this ache

You spoke of love so effortlessly

But tell me, have you learned that is not the same as being able to give and receive love properly?

I learned to cry silently
To fear making sounds when I walked
So much of me is desperate
Not to disturb the peace
I suppose that’s the child in me

I grew up bitter and calloused
Keeping sharp edges around conversation
Because if I spoke harshly enough,
If I spoke concisely enough,
It would pierce the miasma around me

They told me not to take up space
That my thoughts didn’t matter
And so I learned to keep to myself
It hurt far less than rejection

When we first met how did you describe me?
What did you say?

I could not stop talking about you.
I went on about you like you were the very stars.

Or at the very least,
How they were placed in the heavens for your express enjoyment.

I went on for hours,
about how when you touched me,
I could have melted in your hands.

You had me under a spell,
I would have done anything for you.

I could tell you about how I write poems about you — like clockwork.

How every other one I would bitterly title as the last words I would give to you.

How easily I broke my own promises, and how satisfying it was to make you out as something sweeter than you are.

You wouldn’t want to hear about how caught I was in your eyes, in your laugh; in your smile and the words I always took the wrong way.

How delusional I was, how hopeful, how sad, but maybe that would explain the things I can’t find the voice to say.

I think sometimes we take silence for what it isn’t, because we get confused between what we need to be told and what we want to hear.

Frustrated
Confused
Everything comes to an end?
Too quick
Not enough time

You will never be new again

When I can’t find you on the pages I live between, I’ll scrawl you across my own.

You’ll find yourself a decade from now scattered across syllables and syntax you never laid hands on.

I can’t go looking for something to save me,

So instead I spend my time thinking about how the bare branches of trees are the most beautiful and how crooked limbs, asleep, are the same.

I think a part of you felt
That if you kept hurling stones
Eventually I’d use them to build a wall
And shut you out…

Is sadness just another precious thing you have given to me?

Possibly the worst feeling
Is to know you did your best
But even then, it was not enough

So I find myself becoming bitter
You might ask why
For if I were merely sweet,
This pain would have eaten me already

Regret?
We were not well acquainted until just recently
I sit with regret and we speak,
Of wants and wishes,
Of too little, too late.

Mostly we sit in silence,
Because you did not meet the best version of me

The heart dies twice—

First when we realize the world is neither as kind nor good as we once believed

The second comes when we are incapable of believing it to be either

The first is borne from necessity

The second serves no further purpose than to illustrate tragedy…

When you say my name, your voice drips with venom

You cringe at the bitter taste as it rolls off your tongue

When I try to speak your name it becomes heavy in my throat

Stealing away my breath as I churn at the very thought of you

“Some day I will write poems about this but first I must survive it.”

Give yourself permission to survive.

This is how art is made.

In the same way Van Gogh painted his Starry Night from the window of an asylum—

It was the safety of the cell,
And not his insanity,
That lifted the brush.

Never apologize for your art.