I Return Howling

i return howling

black ringed eyes of smudged morality / questionable practises of immortality.

after ten thousand years you’d think we’d start to lose the taste / of salt and skin, lips to face.

kiss me still when i am inhuman / a beast wandering through the night.

here we are in the forest, teeth and claws and all / here we are in this dark humanity, ready to fall.

even then when i am lonely / i dream in full moons, bruised skies turned holy

i still sleep quiet underneath the night / i return, howling, home to you.

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

it’s my blog’s first birthday today! i wanted to do something special to celebrate all the work that’s gone into it and all the lovely people who’ve decided to follow and support my crazy mess of a self, so here we are. send me asks from the ask meme i posted please, or questions, or anything at all, really. :)

creep

when i hear keys i start to flinch instinctively, hide my hands and whatever is in them. most often it’s nothing but heavy footsteps start me creeping towards the door and coffee smells like salt and dead earth. we buried bodies in the backyard and planted tomatoes over them, growing in red like blood. the pool floats in its own waste of chemical water and dead things. what a sore sight to see, such bruises building on a body. black-blue purple and the brown of a rotten fruit, sweet and we smash the pulp to smithereens. dig a hole with keys and scrape the ground for seeds: i hide in the leaves and bury myself among the bodies. plant this unrest or insomniac nights. i was born without a sense to feel. i can still feel you watching me.

occupation day

a girl walks in wearing a NASA shirt and galaxy print leggings, everyone thinks oh, rockets, she’s got the glasses to be an engineer. she raises her hand to ask, is the never-ending void an acceptable job? there was a help wanted sign on the desk of the universe and i’m attempting to fill the position. a pencil two rows over gets pulled in by her gravity (purple with black and blue sparkles) and she just smiles, tosses it back out past her edges and says you’re lucky it wasn’t turned into spaghetti. the physics goes over their head. all over her paper she observes and draws particles and she knows that by doing this she changes what they are but maybe if she didn’t notice them they wouldn’t exist at all. later when the teacher calls on her she says quantum mechanics and the formula for how long it takes to reach the ground because this time an entire desk rolled over to her, the focus of the room. it’s an occupational hazard, drawing things in. red and blue logo and she thinks there’s some light inside it just can’t get out past her event horizon and she wants to know has anyone ever heard of something coming out of a black hole, or anyone coming back? her shoes have constellations like her freckles and no one noticed when they winked, twinkled, she shimmered out of existence. she was going to prove wormholes and timeless stars and maybe dead cats she was just waiting for her rocket to take off the ground. empty desk and David Bowie and the occupational hazards of being a black hole that even in your lack of existence everyone is pulled in by your void, the spaces in between stars and the letters on her t-shirt spelling out G A L A X Y where she left blank spaces for compensation. she’s somewhere out there tearing up a storm or aurora borealis, shining green-blue lights so far past herself she could never lose them. entire worlds and universes she could swallow in an instant with her big, hungry eyes. always looking up saying is there more? and knowing every star by name. a girl walks out of the room, into the office of the universe and applies for the position to fill the spaces, checks all the boxes until she’s told yes. supernova bursts forth from the room but she still says do you think anyone could ever find the edges? and runs chasing after it, laughing, crying, filling up the void.

ABNEGATION MEANS REFUSAL

i write a love letter to the way you refuse to make sense, defy everything. gravity, physics, that small thing you kept warm inside your hands, fighting death when it came calling. fighting the world when it refused to get out of your way. said, you can’t. says you: watch me, & you storm the barricade like a natural disaster to break everything apart. these doors stay open because you’re afraid of the dark, folded in on the couch, & even while you sleep your hands are curled into fists around roses, ravens that claw through the night. you unravel between slotted fingers to fall petals, ghosts, a chainlink fence & a body, stand defiant again in abnegation. your shattered ribs & shoulders hold feathers, drift soundlessly out to sea. i love you again every time you say no, each time you prove them wrong. you stand, you’re breaking, you are selfless because you give to hold on. one time you brought home anything you found that looked lonely. quantified this scales to a monstrosity, an unimaginable heart to make its resting place behind your sternum, heavy in its beat, steadily giving out. you don’t know how to give it up. you don’t know how to say it hurts without pushing past the collapse. you shudder & the thing within you trembles, that smallness tucked inside those hollow bones, how no one can make you do anything but how you are trying to make up for everything. i don’t understand how all of you can be contained, why you don’t burst apart at the seams, if you are sheer will keeping yourself inside. your hands hold tender still the world, shut doors with cautious keeping, fight on in spite of bloody apparitions. you, the brave. you, the selfless. you, refuse to stop loving with every inch of your body, refuse to make sense, refuse to give up anything that makes you what you are, & i write to pay homage to that godless magic. they say: bow down, give in, cave to something greater. leave that there to die, wither away, kill the hope blossoming, fly east in the winter, say yes three times and believe it say no and don’t mean it. drop the heavy heart inside your chest, so apathy can make a home. give us everything you are. & you: refuse.