effervescent

I do not thank you enough,

Creature made of white and gold and painted purple frillythings

I do not thank you enough,

Holding a dollyhouse with both our grievances

I do not thank you enough,

The little badtouches, sillydreams

I do not thank you enough,

Chased the ghost of whiteout and rubberstalks

I do not thank you enough,

Laughter came bubbling from the back of her hindbrain

I do not thank you enough,

Laser-focused on the freezeframe

I do not thank you enough, 

Pink, cheeks ruddy with glitterglue and blushdust

I do not thank you enough,

Together, weeping and maybe holding our pinkyfingers

I do not thank you enough,

Bestfriends, girlhood, forevermore, permanently—

Thankyou,

—sweet sixteen. Lightweight and blown into the size of our pupils, the launchpad—

Thankyou,

—held our intertwined daydreams, oh, don't tell me—

Thankyou,

—don't breathe it, the opening-closing of mouthed goodbyes—

Thankyou,

—so telltale, can't be anything but a lifelong lie.

- SEPT 2026. 1:31 AM

sometimes, running

I've developed a habit of running my mouth. Trilling my tongue over teeth—white keys, black keys, you know, the pockholes between milk teeth—aiming to dash to the other side, my stature a tad too young for this. Thumb and pinky over the line zippered up my sternum, trying to bridge this canyon. Because no matter what you say, I have to make this jump.

You could, idealistically, trail that zipper down—why don't you? But be gentle, mind those nippers, your teeth against teeth, biting the link—pearly whites, again we are running, racing against steel gray—and there you tug, till the fabric unravels, spooling as a heap of silk. Go ahead, then, reach inside, rifle around, dig through the drawers. Pass your palm around the walls. Close your hand around anything substantial, give it a squeeze with your index, middle, and thumb. I won't react.

And you might say, There's nothing here. Squeeze. Where your heart once lay is a scientific replica, a perfectly feigned reaction. Where agony once spindled across as veins has been filled as golden cracks in lucent porcelain. 

And that's the truth, no? Fundamentally, you have been built wrong. You're missing something, your core lacking, your skin shallow, your soul chipped. The attention that governs your strata of functions, it's a far too complicated system to parse; I could trail after you, keep to you, tend and tether—let your head fade, the fear run blithely hot, and still, you wouldn't give me an answer: love or limerence, obsession or trust? Loving on parallel lines, never perpendicular, these relations grown homemade in poor taste; all your bits and bobs, clumping together a machine whose operations tick behind the layman, a beat off the person beside you. 

You admire love, you admire persistence, but the gears of which this racepath runs winds up becoming a strung accord of fitting neurosis.

Squeeze. Dashing, really. The way your flesh would part. I am not a lover. You'll be fine if I sink lower, deeper, undo the buttons on your throat, stick this arm inside till we hit bone—squeezing for life, searching for your reading on love, love, don't you daydream of it all, find it banal. Where's the reciprocation? The give and take of it all. And what comes is not the scream of contentment, of satisfaction, an endorphin cascade, but a sound of violence, an act of cold, unpleasant limpidity, a limb cleaved that mankind so easily extends. Dreamed of this, but the reality is joyless; promised this, but you don't take pride in it. A hole where love lay. Heart stolen. Or never there, in the first place. 

Don't tell a lie, or at least, tell enough to delay the truth. You can't outrun karma. The death knell of your wedding bells. Joyless. Or not really, I'd hope, holding your hand. Just separate wayward travelers, perpetually adjacent to the roads trodden toward happiness—perpendicular to me but parallel to you. And maybe, you know, as you lift my veil, your heart still cold and your body still frigid, you can consider this as fate. You will promise me on the altar, you selfish heartless thing—with an appetite for the tragic and the palate for the bitter—to love me in a way that matters… At least, I think I would. 

~ AUG 2026

temporal headache

It feels like i have been losing everything meant dear to me, in tiny echolocating fragments, pittering-pattering as they tumble down emptied halls, these shattered glass bits

Don't really seem that important until you peer closer and observe. Tiny dead things entombed below like amber, catching the graylight in likeness of fading embers, fizzling till

One remains, and it's really a pathetic story, falling down the house floor and through the looking door in wrong plays and faces that turn up in the wringer, rumpled-spilt and skinned.

Ideally you'd see me, maybe a shard that took hold, broken apart, chauvinistic pieces; deadly flames, battered heroisms. I recall flooding cries, fitful cryonic bursts, exploding in pellets like souring candy, popping new flavors of decorum that weigh down on your mouth.

Temporal headache.

I think I will stand here in the rain for

Many a time, really,

Detailing a body's diary and a life that genuinely, truly, cannot be deeper than flesh, deeper than bone and ripened skin, a slurry of empty tears and spittle on the kitchen counter that bleeds stripes over floors, doors, the doorway

The doorway stretches into a barren, minimalistic hall and you,

You stood there, 

Me, honestly, I stood there,

We, honestly, don't stand there,

All of us, really, can't stand here.

Till it's pieces and pieces and pieces and we don't know whose name we call or beckon or answer or fear,

Till it's me me me me, now the cord flips over and the loops become edges, the hoops enter new nets, the coups fill the streets and roar, roar, roar—

We—

We...

We generally. Believe. In ghosts.

That if I die we all die, and everyone before you.

Let's start with a hand. 

Private ranting, personal diary, lettering the end of my own—our own—dismal days in one-a-two-a-three's. 

Hey there,

Hey there hey there,

Three hundred syllables and none of them drop short

Three million more names, how many days have passed?

Ah,

I am,

Living in a country and house and a room with walls that,

Don't really belong here the same way you don't either,

The same way none of us really fill this hole the same way it has been poured with cement,

The same way none of us really inhabit this automaton,

None of us really inhabit,

None of us really.

Temporally

Have a headache.

Temporally

Have a day, even.

Temporally, 

Don't remember that we 

Temporally,

Temporarily,

Temperedly,

Have

Ever, ever,

Lived as one, do we.

~ 4:50 AM. MAY 2026.

venus fly trap

There is a haunted ghoul that walks my walls, his toe boots metal and capped with steel;

He walks with a gait, on horseback, a parry, guns and ash-powder trailing over the floor. He carries the scent of magnolia and gray, a profile detailed in vignetted ochre; sepia and centered, two pieces of jaded sheen, like fragments of the orient, distilled into lenses.

His lips move blue and thin like ice cracks. His skin blanches as white as Siberian snow. That nose rubs red as cranberries crushed, fading more colors onto his shadow.

I never knew how to heave tricolors. Just the bone and flesh of two shades off. You fancied a wilted flower, so you plucked me in a warpath to further storm my halls. Burning my garden. Burning my legacy. Burning my rage. A flower blooms in misery. Red and white and red and gold and red and blue and white and all, the, awful, colors. 

All the awful colors.

~ MAY 2026.

you'd wish, but...

i think about it all the time, the

way your tongue lashed furious lies behind the sweetest layer of rot, and your pantomiming

hands that delegated and ceded and cast off all your aches to me.

yes,

i think about them often-times when my brain splits open the shell, pushing around yolk on my plate with the tasteless beans that follow, baked as sludge on my palate,

and so it's been a year since you came and left me, 

been a year since two pairs, four hands, tumbled the house of cards. arrived wreathed in white daisies, emptied me out

and painted with cutters the fickle names of unwanteds onto blank canvased skin, presented as a whole, complete being, now projected 

onto that computer, that devil, with ashen text and audio whimpers.

so i have to ask.

hey, was i ever

good enough for you?

or was that speech, that charade, that tiresome act of folly and featherlight kisses 

crawling around your feet and playing nonsense foolish games

winning my own prizes, held close to where old scars lay—

either way, 

tell me, tell me i was your jester. tell me i played the clown. because if i had played the good man, the wise man, 

what would that mean for myself?

...

i'd like to say thank you to the bars that bloomed 

in supermarket-wrapper scan codes amidst the mundanity of normal life

pasted as a bandaid over my corneas

a black wall holding back gallons you had picked and purchased at a whim, and

with one red scan, i'll be yours forever.

except it wasn't like that. wasn't this easy. wasn't the claim you made.

so now i've been repeating the same, mechanical motions and crossing same, mechanical days off my lines, and i'd realize, in due time, i'm a liar, too. because

somewhere, i hope you still

worship a part of me.

somewhere, i hope you

rip off the bars over my eyes and

remind me of how much i missed you.

~ 4:18 AM. FEB 2026.

On the topic, to crush bugs beneath your toes:

Right, I say as I turn the page shut, let's begin this tragicomedy told in a handful of acts. I lift a finger—unfortunately, this is the second time I've had to repeat this, but I digress—no matter, I wail, screaming into a soundless vortex. There were metaphors and analogies and dilly-dallyisms that were here before they were whitened by water. I guess some things, according to fate, were truly never meant to be.

So let's reconstruct this hate from memory—piece by bitter piece. Reminiscing of a timeline five months prior is too mundane of a doom-scrawl, no, I fear I have been consumed by vile vitriol. Let's go back in time, hop into that little storybook I've tailored, fitted nook and cranny to the lies and sweetums I've had to sweep away. Oh, what dust. It's getting between the claws of my fingertips.

There was a tale here, and if I recall correctly with my handprints over the sand, detailed the loss and lovelorn of the Devil, the God-King, and the Fool. Here, at the edge of the Earth, where lines meet and ends met in the tides washed over-shore, I can pick apart and scrutinize our co-written, co-authored disbelief. 

It begins something like this: on the topic of hatred, I have only one thing to say—you were my first love, but you will not be my last. That seat of misery has been reserved for another, and I have already smeared their black-bones with agony parallel to the floor. Crushed by footsteps, smattered by bugs; that was what I should have done to you the moment we traded breaths.

Some say the walks of life, of death, would blow kisses at air, brush tongues or cheeks, perhaps a little this-and-that as they chase each other's tails. But no, you were different—tongue in cheek, maybe? Kissing me to death, slowly? That's venomous, you tar-addled snake. 

I'm losing coherence of the story, but I remember it's partially mine to blame, wearing scarlet-windowed lenses like a cross hung ninety-degrees. Do you remember the Devil? Indeed, he gave it to me, pressed them over my lashes and whispered half-truths, real lies; selling me concepts of no tangibility. Promises of no deadlines, more boundaries blurring from lies, lies, lies.

You were the Devil, that's what you are, and had no idea you masqueraded as such. And you, you, you damn evil God-King, this fool became a deity-killer just to crack your coconut-skull. Hell, I should've done worse; I should've stomped your ribs in till they caved like a canyon scarred in its abdominal middle. I tripped and fell for those lies, those honey-trapped promises; suckled on them till I was brained like a toddler, addicted to a taste so sickening it could only be dribbled from poison.

Trip, trip, trip. This is where I tap the cover of my book. You cannot blame a fool for falling in love when he has never been given warmth. You cannot blame a blind man for falling into consequences when he cannot fathom an elephant. In a language you've missed, we have a term—puk gai, or quite literally, falling on the street, and those who are in-the-know, know, that when your feeble hands paw the concrete and your pearly teeth knock white against red against gray, that's a curse, that's your fall; may you drop dead.

By the off-chance the slain corpses of ants and insectoids come across my will, I have nothing to apologize except for the halt of my tall finger. I should've been harsher; I should've done everything I had listed above. I should've shoved my heart down your throat till you memorized the feeling of choking on glass, should've punched my elbow into your Adam's apple till you vomited out that pulsating organ. Perhaps then, as you hurl and heave bile, you'll learn to visualize a fraction of the distaste I have to live with for the rest of my mediocre life.

On the topic, to rip your vocal cords out and snap them over two spines—

—kiss the damn, fucking dirt, the both of you, and may we never meet in Heaven, in Hell, or on the same soil of our great, mowed planet.

~11:35 PM. MARCH 2025.

On the topic, to Breathe:

E'er since that day I've been holding something back. Something unsaid, something you won't like to hear. 

Afraid of my own reflection I seek answers in slate. Stoned by realizations, held down by the fear of my own feelings, that was how I lived. 

I take my first breath.

E'er since that day I've been wishing we never met. Something untold, something I don't want to hear.

Afraid of your reflection I sought questions in dread. Eaten by emotions, held down by the worry of my own prejudice, that was how I died.

Where were you when you left?

I took my first breath.

If we never meet again,

then it's for the better.

If we never speak again,

then it's for the better.

You took my first words, you took my first love, you took my first hate, you took it all without even knowing, and perhaps, that's the only better. 

The only part that stops bleeding. 

The only part that needed healing, the only part.

I'm running out of first breaths.

Last one, of the beginning, of the newfound pathways and neural-rural routes we discovered, the day we took to the countryside and stayed. 

Again, of the midst of fake tears and fake laughs; pulling away with a grin and a torched, ash-ridden face.

Pray,

pray,

prayed that you'd never return. Leave, leave! Get out of here! I didn't say.

I lost my first breath.

Until the sun shone over my stricken face,

Until the canopy in the leaves formed a cradle of thirteens.

Until everything. Until I noticed, too, I was holding 

A breath I never swallowed.

One more time.

One more breath.

Another first, a new day.

I take my first breath.

~ 06:35 PM. MARCH 2025.

FESTIVE SOLITUDE

Heaven’s eye, rippling across a sea of red stars,

Burning clear, aflame, an intense agate sun;

Alone, Mercury whispers, brokering an agreement;

Watching, watching—as the light beams fade,

In solitude, in silence; thinned into the backdrop of space.

And the Earth says:

 “Those stars, amongst the tattered streaks of heaven;

 Our sun, straining to breathe in the timeworn air;

 Don’t we live for euphoria? Again and again,

 We chase a dream that disintegrates to ash,

 We celebrate, we pray, we laugh, we cry;

 Yet our festivities, so joyful, still burn from its place,

 dispersing into tiny, uncountable, brief little things

   that bury into the sand below,

    that bury into the gorge below,

     that bury into the chasm of one’s, zeroes—

 —maw open; within our Body under the gaze of God—

 —we little things, of an end to the heat we wish,

 as we bear witness to an End that holds no reply.

 “And we, the firebugs, the ones that chase after light,

 the useless, dreary, fickle little things;

   Us, the tiny bugs,

   alone in our world,

   in a boxed room of lies we worship and idolize—

we dream one dream of reaching the stars,

to carve out our loneliness, to wave our achievements—

—a festival of solitude. A festival of Us.”

Only silence remains.

Replying, Mercury whispers to the firebugs below:

 “the heat of heaven roars

 but our pinpricks of light

 will never be enough for you

 will never be enough to sate.

 your victories are joyless

 your life defines the momentary

 in pale flickers of fire

 your meaning disappears.

 you deserve to live unanswered

 and leave no trails in history

 nothing will be enough

 to satisfy the hole that gapes—

 to you, this is everything.

 to us, a product of time.

 and since nothing will ever matter,

 nothing will ever change.”

…

The eye of heaven falls shut, skies torn asunder.

Still, the world heaves its breath, ready to burn again.

~ JAN 2024

intertwined

Briefly, let me fizzle out. Let us die as twin flames

Eternity, amiss, an endless embrace

The boundaries blur as our promise interlocks—

—Splat.

Oops. Pulp gouged; slopped dead on the floor,

Poured out and hollowed into naught but marrow,

Halt when it’s coreless; like spiderwebbed glass

Half of one is still less than half.

You’re washed in gray, we’re both scrubbed clean. I sit on

the tumbling sandhills, dusted up into lapins

Masseter, temporalis. Open wide, you say

And we both know it’s Apathy that swallows.

Have you rung a death knell that rings without noise?

At the edge of my eyes, your countenance depletes

A quasar that consumes, your cell’s a halo

That leaves behind this message:

Emptiness consumes,

Depravity remains,

And regrets do not look back.

~ OCT 2024

plea deal