Midnight

—

I don’t think you realize,
the way you cause earthquakes,
in everyone you touch.
I can still feel your aftershock
under my skin.

You tasted like strawberries and shards of glass,
but I devoured you anyways,
until my cheeks were filled with the sound of your name.
And when you told me how much you the despised the day

I thought that I might try to extinguish the sun with the pad of my thumb,
if I were not so fond
of the way you wear my fingerprints.

Because I just realized how infinitely
your face mirrors the night sky,
and got lost trying to connect your freckles
into constellations.
It was only when I first discovered the big dipper resting
on your right cheekbone did I remember,
I’m terrified of heights.

Sunday Afternoon (A Villanelle)

—

Cock-a-doodle do!
Empty beer can, have you seen the house key?
Good-morning to you!

Hey kid, get up, the room reeks of disappointment, and de-ja-vu.
With your wide-eyed indifference, what do you see?
Cock-a-doodle do!

Nobody cares what you’ve been through,
time to wake up and face the world with me.
Good-morning to you!

Don’t make me go out there alone, too.
How old were you when you lost your sympathy?
Cock-a-doodle do?

What is there even out there to do?
This planet is a bowl of human potpourri.
Good-morning to you!

I like the overcast days too, like us, uncomfortably blue.
It’s a quarter-life-crisis guarantee.
But I guess that depends on your point-of-view.
Good-morning to you.

Anchors

—
Some days words wrap themselves about me like weeds,
embedding their roots around my uncoordinated

central-nervous-system,
and in the awkward gap
In-between my two front teeth.

My mother used to scold me to chew my food,
but 20 times grew redundant.
And now I speak with a mouth so full,
that not even I can understand the broken syllables,
of tangled nothings,
that are pre-maturely projected from my pregnant cheeks,
and into the air.

I myself am a walking contradiction,
held together with countless forgotten names and  misplaced good intentions
all stitched up in this too-fragile thing we call a body.

A thing too fragile,
for a world that is made up 70% of water.
And 17% more percent of “land inhabitable for human life”.
Inhabitable,
for a heart that has to beat 100,00 times a day

just to keep you breathing.

You see,
this was never about me, darling.
This,
this is about all of us.
We are uncomfortable mixtures of impossible things.

Because if this planet were made for us,
we would not have to pause,
every 15 minutes—
(in the U.S alone)
Because a too fragile soul could not find it within themselves
to stay here with us.

But just because something is not made for us,
does not mean that we cannot make it work.
Trust me.
I know there are some days when your bones feel like bricks,
and your bloodstream has you convinced that it’s cement.
But that does not mean that your body cannot be a monument.
Our spines are not anchors.
Do not let the efforts of your organs go to waste.
Do not allow the places we can’t go to ruin you.
And for those of you who have been keeping track,

I know that that might only leave us with 13% of habitable land left,

But that is still over 24 million square miles on this Earth
out there for us to see.