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.

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.

Who I am,
Is so deeply interwoven
With the broken parts of me

I fear if I heal them,
Then I will lose myself

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.

You are still so deeply engraved in my heart
Daggers on every page of this story
I offer flowers of reconciliation
Because that’s what fools do

When you said my name, I realized I had been saying it wrong my whole life.

I find myself drawn to you,
Like the tide pulled by the moon
And I wonder if you too are lonely,
Carrying the weight of the night,
Alone

I think the problem is,
There is not enough of me,
For me

My heart has become timid
So quiet,
You might mistake its hush for a silent pool
Whose water lies still
And depth deceives those who stare too long
Into believing it shallow
Shunning the height of emotion
Lest it drown in the undertow
I struggle to stay afloat,
Forgive me

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

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

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

I wish the world were made differently

I wish growth didn’t have to hurt

I wish feeling happiness didn’t rely on knowing sadness

I wish pain were not necessary to know pleasure

I wish I could have learned through love

Am I better today than I was yesterday?
Have I learned to be humble?
Do I take care of my thoughts when I am alone?
Do I mind my words when I am with others?

I must destroy the idea,
That I am better than anyone else

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

Can you comprehend the language of my pain?
The pain which I cause,
In my ignorance and shame.

My apologies are spoken,
To mend the space
Between who I am and where I am broken,
In damaged bonds I cannot replace.

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

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

Endings in real life come suddenly,
Often without warning or making sense

I’ve never liked this

One day you wake up only to realize,
It was all a very long time ago
And we are different people

There is no closure
No neat narrative,
To wrap it all up

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…

I wish I had the words
To tell you I miss you
Rather,
I wish I were allowed
Without disturbing your peace

To tell you how much you mean to me,
Without expectation

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

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

I thought I was done with this pain

And yet,

I am burnt to ashes

Only an elegy could illustrate this ache

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.

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 am thankful for each goodbye spoken to me

The most painful are never said,

Never explained

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

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

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

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

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.

If it's all the same to you, if I could go back to the day we met, I would not turn around and walk away.

I do not regret you.

Dear reader,

Will you sit with me in silence,

When my words no longer work?

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.

You shine,

Like the buckle of Orion’s belt,
Like the intertwined wrists of Castor and Pollux

Two soulless constellations locked within solar flare and interstellar disconnect.

I wonder if you shine because comets trail from your eyes

Or if maybe you are trying to catch the gaze of Orpheus, whose love for Eurydice is dampened by the glow of your smile

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.

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.

We are not one breed – but we are all reaching; all trying to dash out our insides in an effort to find something we never knew was there.

I find I’m tired of life and I’m tired of not living, but I can’t stop breathing any more than I can stop writing.

Never love a writer, because though most of us will not be remembered centuries from now, all of us leave something.

They say that the world was built for lovers but we’re the ones cast to keep note.

I was fun to chase but boring to keep

When they ask why I can't let the notion go,

It's because I want to hate it properly

To love me is to accept sleepless nights; to accept immortality; to accept that you love what you cannot mend. In other words (which are not my own):

“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness.”

Is love made meaningless in impermanence?

No, no more than anything else

Still, the world is awash with reasons not to love

I am not convinced by a single one

You have been a teacher
Of passion and guilt
Quiet Rebellion
That resounds now still
And I,
Disobedient,
Followed and learned,
From you,
And of you

If a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?

It’s not so much philosophy so much as it is physics but I won’t bore you with the science when I say:

Did you know when you heart trembles,
Cracks,
Fractures,
Breaks in two,
With no one to heal it or love,
It doesn’t make a sound?

Did you know that your sadness,
That so often goes unseen and unheard,
Becomes a poison to your very soul?

Did you know that this silence,
This ambivalence,
This distance between us,
Destroys me?

I think you do.

I bury you in the marrow of my bones

Forever to be carried in this wreckage

A derelict heart full of curses and portents

Salted wounds and blood in the water

Ships arriving on strange shores

Satellites in eternal free fall

Orbiting stars named for blasphemed gods

Their supplicants and shrines

Long since consumed by fire

Or in moorland, drowned and exhumed

A place once called home, become a tomb

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.

In my heart lie splinters
Often going unnoticed
For the greater pain of you

Each one composed
Of the things which redirect to you

A string of unrelated words
No connected thread
Save for you

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?

What is the secret to your rage?

How do you hold your grudge?

What do you tell yourself to commit to your hate?

I sit here and watch how harshly it divides and yet,

Can I learn it too?

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.