I want you fire-eyed, helpless,
and passion-driven.
I want you irrational and guilt-stricken.
I want you spiteful,
conflicted,
loving,
I want you going, coming, and running.
I want you heaving, shoving, screaming, sighing,
pulling, pushing, laughing, lying.
I want you holding my face in the palms of
your hands and crying

    I don’t want to want you,

    but I really do.

I want that fire in your eyes to
turn a dull shade of blue
every time you get your saddened hands to
wave good-bye.
I want you finding that weak spot
on my shoulder without having to try
and giggling like a child
on a sugar high,
I want to kiss away your shy side
until darkness
is no longer necessary
for you and I
to lock eyes.
My blinding light,
I want you toes curling
and tongue-tied,
I want you realizing
I’ve set your vocal chords
free,
as you bite into the sheets
to muffle your screams,
I want you doing those things
you said you wished you could do to me,
I want you shaky-kneed
breathing
please stay
    don’t leave
right into my mouth,
where only I can taste you
and hear you.
I want to guide you, and steer you
into the gates of hell where the
flames themselves will blister
from the burning fire that is
the two of us,
I want you to call us “us”
and savor the sweetness of the word
before you smack your own lips
at your carelessness.
My heaven-sent,
I want to tell you how I think
your hypnotizing hips
are actually made of God’s
favorite symphony, and when it’s played,
how I’m certain that the whole universe
fucking bows and breaks at your
divinity,
I want you to break me
the way you do every time you feel like
solving me,
the way you piece back a goddamn puzzle.

I don’t know how you put me back together.
I’m the girl who confessed her cynicism
at “forever”,
I’m the girl who promised never to pen any love-letters,
and this again is not a letter,
this is a confession of sleep-deprived hands that
didn’t know any better,
these are the silent whisperings of fingers whose tips
have grown addicted to the feel of the insides of your lips.
My lover,
I tasted melancholy on your shoulder
that night I held you against my chest
and begged the sky
to either grant me another kiss
before I lose myself to this restlessness
or just shake the heaviness in my breath
that comes with the very mention of your glorious name.
My never again,
you asked me not to leave any traces
of this sweet sin on your honey-dipped skin,
so instead I bit my tongue and poured my blues
into your morning coffee
and never told you why that last breakfast
had your chest so heavy and full of aching.

I hope that secret hickey I left on the walls
of your heart
stays put.

Dear Words,

I am writing through you to you because
you are the only things that are capable of making a poet
fall to her knees -
and I
don’t claim to be a poet
in a way
Wordsworth or Plath
would approve of,
but my knees are scuffed and bloody for you,
and because of you.
     Words, I found you in the darkness
when all I needed was something to
sink my teeth into, when all I wanted
was something to dig my nails
in night after night

but you clogged my arteries,
and you traveled up my spine like chills;

tugging at the very fibers of my existence,
and you made sure to seduce me when
all I had
to pride myself with was my
independence -
when I was the queen of avoiding attachment
to strings that dangled so persistently before my eyes,
and yet I soon found your threads
forming webs all over and around me,
claiming me victim,
claiming the start of a one-sided
addiction and dependency.
My dear words, all you desired was to
seep out
of my ink-blotted pores and into these
beautiful and naked
pages of books I called my second skin -
and all I wanted was to keep you inside me,
to keep you rolling over and under my tongue,
until I memorized the way you tasted,
until I could confidently say
I knew you well.
But these gracious pieces of paper were
always more than just silent leaves
where I left you to rest;

they were crime scenes.

They were incriminating evidence of nights I laid my body atop
these notebooks and was stabbed by the need to
exorcise these phrases from my soul until
I bled black ink
in the shape of letters.
But you shaped me unsatisfied
and you stabbed me only when you pleased,
and you promised me solace
each time, but you always just left me there
on my knees.
Me
on the floor
with remnants of the alphabet
under my nails and unworded stories hiding
under my bones. Every time I tried to breathe them
out and pull them into the light,
I always found more of you than I originally anticipated.

Like ribbons from a clown’s lips,

I could never guess the colors or
the damage you’ll do or undo to me.
But you keep leaving me with eyes like
neon signs screaming

 ”This is not enough; this is never enough”.

Always wanting more;
always needing that one last verse or that
one last stanza to complete me. Some twisted
love affair we’ve had, you made me whole only
to make me feel more hollow.  I’ve always been fascinated at how
that intense and electrifying sense of ecstasy
you bestow so generously upon me
flees away so hastily before I can fully drink it down.
But I’ll still ask you to keep driving me to insanity,
words - I will beg of you.
Because, my words, you’ll always find a way to
make me sane again.

If only for a little while.

Forever your lover,
forever your obedient slave,

Hala.

Blue was your
least favorite color,
but you wore it on
your skin like a trophy,
like it was something
you were born in,
like it was a gift
you were asked
to never take off.
Empty smiles served
as your silver and gold,
as your diamonds
and pearls,
you thought them
very well befitting the
scarves strung
around your neck:
those knitted little
must-not-speaks
that threatened to pull
at both sides if you were
ever to utter those words
that churned the very
insides of your stomach.

Here you are, facing
the mirror that never
quite gave you clarity.
You are anything
but true to yourself.

You spend your days
in a violent haze,
drowning in
your merciless thoughts. In your
head, they’re
boundless as the sea
but they end up condensed
to a single insignificant drop
that lingers unspoken
at the tip of your tongue
until you find yourself
swallowing,
defeated.
If this feeling were a
part of human anatomy,
you think
it would definitely be
a rib cage, for it holds you
hostage;
quietly asphyxiated,
effectively suffocated,
promising eternal safety
to the seemingly undying
ache it harbors – to
the inhales and exhales
of a hopeless entity,
to a Stockholm Syndrome
victim who never
knew any better.
If this feeling were a
part of human anatomy,
you think
it would never be a hand,
for hands always give,
and hands always caress,
and hands always comfort,
and all it does is take
away more and more
of your livelihood,
as it robs you
of your will to breathe.
These can’t be fingers,
you think,
because fingers
are graceful,
and fingers
hold,
and all you ever
seem to be doing is
falling
ever so gracelessly.

Here you are,
chalking your pain
up to destiny.
You are anything
but safe in your skin.

You lie in an
unfathomable mess
of adult urges
and childish fears.
You think your future’s
all written out
for you like a script
you can’t ever change:
Act one;
you are forever
defined
by the shifting of
your eyes, by the
hesitation of your
lips, by the worrisome
longing of your skin.
Act two;
you will always be
waiting for the chaos
in your head
to settle, for the
whispering in your
ears to speak
in a different
language,
a language you know
you’re allowed
to listen to.
The final act;
you will spend
the rest of your
mortality
wishing for a time
and place where
these words
could slide right off
your taste buds without
a life sentence.
And then you will die.

And yet, here you are,
entrapping yourself
in your own version of
black and white stripes.

You are anything,
but you are nothing
until
you admit
that this is who you are,
until you hold your head
up high -     not in pride,
but in recognition,
and appreciation of the
parts of you
that refuse to wilt
away, of the side of you
that refuses to
break at the bending
of your surroundings.
You are anything,
but you are nothing
because you keep
yourself imprisoned
in this shameful prism.
You’ve gone and
confined your own light
inside these hateful walls,
unaware that
all you ever had to do
to feel alive is to
just let it flow right out of you,
so it could pass through
and seep to the other side;
so your rainbows
could set the universe
into color, could set
their depressing grey
into an understanding
shade of
everything
between red and violet.
You are anything,
but you are nothing
until you tear off the skin
sewn forcefully onto your body
for the skin you were born in.

This is who you are.

And better aeons late
than never,
make peace with it.

You say you’d like to buy
a time machine and replay
that year all over again.
You say you’d do it all
over and over, until it’s over,
until it’s really, really over;
until you no longer get the urge
to lay your head on grassy
landscapes just to look for my face
in the stars. You say it’s gone
and we’re different, you say the only
thing that’s still the same is the way
that music in our chest
still plays that old tune when
we’re not thinking; still plays that
song that ruptures us when
no one’s looking.

But you’ve got that look in your eye;
the one that says you’re not
telling the truth. You’ve got that
look that’s telling me not to trust
what you’re saying, that same
damn look that intoxicated me
that day you told me
nothing would go wrong
and I was just a little “maybe”,
rolled in flesh and bones, so
unsure of whether you
would kill me or save me. And you
sang me serenades of “sure”
and “absolutely”
and you stood beautifully on my
world with your flag in hand,
and that was the day I became
your absolute Indian.
You stormed in on me,
and I loved the rain, loved the way
your hurricane spun me around because
I was a dancer and you knew exactly how
to hold me; arms up and feet off the
ground – you turned me over and over until I
forgot
how stability felt like.

“Fly me up into your seventh heaven
and promise me
I’ll never learn how it feels to fall”,

until I fall for you.
Until I fall for forever.
Until every step I take is another shard
stuck in the soles of my feet.

This is not about you.

This is about me
all parts of me
burnt-out and broken,
perfect and tainted as I am. This is
about the blood
on our hands and the heaviness
in our chests, about the the scars on
our eyes and the stains on
our flesh. This is about
the past that’s been on repeat,
this is about being stuck in a
fantasy. This is about that
broken record
you and I are sick of listening to,
of feeling to, this is about
the desperate need for an unattainable
fix. You say sorry,
but sorry is just another word
I can no longer hear from all the
goodbyes echoing
in my ears; give me sorries in
rays of light because
my eyes have adjusted to darkness
and I’m terrified of how
they don’t miss the sunshine. But you’re
fading and we’re hopeless, and
my fingers are tired of clutching on to things
that are no longer theirs.
We’re fucking beautiful,
but we’re doomed,
and you say
we were meant
to be, but I think
you’ve misunderstood.
You and I were meant to break
one another, meant
to shatter each other’s souls
until there was nothing left
of us that was fragile,
until we were both loose powder roaming
high above the seven seas and the
wild universes.

“It’ll be because
it’s meant to be”,

and I would have agreed
with you before. But you were my sun
and now
it’s night-time, and it’s no longer
you
I long for; it’s the tips of
my fingers
I left buried in your skin.
You say we can get past it,
you say
it’s water under the bridge,
but I can see you sinking
from miles away;
can see your arms
helplessly
trying
to fight the current, can see
your lungs filling up
with water, can still see
that flicker of hope
in your drowning eyes.

Take a second to listen to the words I’m saying,
that’s all I ask.
If you’d just hear me out,
if you’d just please concentrate for once,
you’d hear that ticking begin to slow, and
you’d see that last speck of sand
rushing into the other half of the hourglass
to find its final resting place.

This, dropping unguarded
and uninhibited,
falling with only maybe-nots in mind
this is the hope I had for us.

This, my love,
my lost love,
this is the end of our time.