Of Roses

of roses

a collection of poems featuring the pieces:

chain of gold

crown of thorns

blood of silver

silvered blood

the ending of the queen

how awful innocence

you can take terrible things and use them to do good. yes, they are still terrible. but take that body and grow flowers from poison in the earth’s veins and you will still have a bouquet to heal and hold. seep aggression into poetry and write beautiful murder. kill every version of yourself that still holds scars and your weeping eyes will start to harden. from coal to diamond we turn combustion into love. firestarter heart that burns or tames; tempered into temperance from abuse. it used to be beautiful to be dying. we are still dying to be beautiful in a terrible, awful way. only innocence can think to turn decay into preservation, capture the spread of sickness from cell to bone and it looks like flowers blooming inside of shattered sidewalks. this thing is gonna kill you no matter what you hope and it’s gonna kill me too. crack the lightbulbs with a scream; turn the power out with heavy winds. open the window to run out. block the doors so no one can get in. you’re leaving behind something terrible and i’m trying to turn it into something good like you asked but that awful innocence of yours left no room for reality. you can be too good, too naïve. i can’t live up to these expectations. my terrible will remain terrible as i run away with anger and roaring winds to escape this good, your awful innocent and how your eyes looked at me weeping then turned to glass and hardened in your death. this thing is gonna kill you, flowers or not, and over your grave i planted marigolds: unspeakable mourning so from your sickness comes light. this body turned deathly into deathless.

i. to live, we require an understanding of our our processes. 
how do we think? synapses fire. 
how do we breathe? expand and contract. 
how do we exist? i can feel it in my teeth.

ii. they ache (everything) to a point of exhaustion. i try for running, i end up exhausted. i try for exhausted, i end up running away. i open every window and leave the lights out to let the breeze crawl its way through this empty house.

iii. i’m making wine inside myself now, a heady intoxication. fermented, the warmth, it spreads through me- every step a wildfire.

iv. anaerobic /x/ adj. without oxygen, only certain things can survive. without oxygen, there is no flame. we ferment our own rejection inside us, call it acid because it burns. that sickness you feel is resentment, warming your bones. hatred. without oxygen there is nothing else and with oxygen-

v. look how brightly we can burn.

vi. to say the difference between us and stars: when stars collapse, we call it a supernova. they spread light throughout everything, permeate the dark.

we are made of stars, and our rib cages only send shrapnel in our shattering.

vii. humanity is a torch, burning through its bases with a wicked flame. at some point we stop calling this arson an accident and instead blame ourselves. we breathe in smoke but do nothing to put out the fire. stand in a burning house and watch it collapse: do nothing, and leave no one to regret how terrible it will fall.

viii. when the first versions of ourselves evolved out of the iron oceans, we call that the Great Dying because anything that could not oxidise could not remain alive. in other words, we took the air and made it poison. we burn, you burn with us.

ix. we burn to survive. a million combustions inside our bodies / raging to fight on against the darkness.

when we move, we are energy / we are wasted potential brought to light.

all that noise, all that emotion / it burns us out. in the end,

we are husks / we are ashes / we are burning and we don’t even know it.

REMEMBER WHEN YOU BREATHE :: o.m. 2017

and yet… you loved him? -ray bradbury, “the utterly perfect murder”

even after this you loved. it took a long time. did you ever realise, in the beginning, what it meant? that no one came to your before-the-sun-rose almost morning cold glass window, painted blue with longing all alone did you know then? did you know then, maybe when you wanted to die. maybe that was a long time before you ever even thought of love. or did you know before the terrible, unutterable betrayal. did you know and so you left. and even after all this time. you held it inside of you, that inalterable past, without ever knowing why. held it in the hollow in your chest, the gap between your collarbone and the line of your ribs pressing against your skin. could you feel it when you held the edges. every morning after that you could see phantom bruises that love in the way boys love boys when they are young, you said, and evil but innocent, and evil. how did you fit such emotion inside of your mouth to swallow the pain. how did it come out in words like those. when did you stop using question marks to say why because you knew you weren’t getting an answer. did he ever call you after all those years, after all those years did you ever call him? and still you knew you loved him without ever caring when or how or why. all of that, inside of you, years and years and years- how could you stand to hold it and how, upon taking a train, bound into the past you thought could not have ever been returned to, years locked up inside your chest those bones old lives and leaving and broken windows how did you learn to let it go.

only two things make me sad: one of them is life, and the other one is trying to live it. i am always afraid of regret. always afraid of the wrong thing. too many days spent in the closet, on the floor, throwing up with my head in a toilet. hands trembling like the wind and i’m still trying to live with this. that tremor won’t ever go away. how can i tell you to live when i don’t want to? and there’s nothing i won’t do to want to. all these admissions and omissions of how much time i really spend trying to function as a human being. isn’t that what we call life? this hell we’re in when we can’t call it hell? we keep on through the precarious existence of the balance between burning fast and flickering out. when it’s beautiful, hold it close. when it’s ugly, hold it the same. if it makes you sad, cry, and i have to cry too. when i see things that make me ache, all over, and want to curl up so i don’t have to face it, i do for a little while. but i still get up when the alarm goes off in the morning saying ‘cheer up. you’re not dead yet’ and when it says ‘one more day’, when it says 'be happy’ and when it says 'ní hên píao líang you are beautiful’ i have to get up. i have to get up for all those who can’t. yes, it hurts to breathe and exist and live but isn’t that what it means to be human? breathe. stand new-made in the shivering light. 
 if you still have a day. live it while you are shaking.

REMEMBER WHY YOU BREATHE :: o.m. 2017

i’m overcompensating for forgetting to breathe by writing too many words

and trying to make them sound poetic 
when really there’s no artistic way to say

i woke up one morning and drank bleach
just to see how it tasted and bled out

in a bathtub dying a thousand little 
deaths every time i breathed in

so you could imagine how it feels to be told you’re writing too many words

when all you’re trying to do is remember 
how it felt to have air in your lungs,

what it tasted like instead of the blood 
that you vomited all over the white tiles.

REMEMBER HOW TO BREATHE :: o.m. 2017