---

I have never heard anyone beg
with such ferocity; let time stop
as it clocked me in the jaw
with your inner thigh as if the tongues
I were speaking were emancipatory

but our lingua franca was constructed
from the only universal human sounds
left to the constrained; halted my muse
from crossing over into coherence; exited my throat
proclaiming the arrival of false demi-gods

so I trailed my tongue across
your black-hole pupils as if butterfly kisses
could patch up the rift between us
after we fucked

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

pirouettes on my heart

I watched your body contort
as if you tangoed with smoke and mirrors;
created illusions
out of broken bones
and fractures like a break dance

and you tapped out morse code
S-O-S on floors
that resonate with
your indecisiveness

but honey,
my life ain't no crystal ball (room)
and you can't cut in
because my acerbic nature
grated emancipation into grit
between its teeth

and I have no need
for a gentleman

a man's breakfast

I woke up with the taste of camaraderie in my mouth;
blanched at the sight of your hair still caught in my teeth
as if you had shed a bit of your soul on my pillowcase. I
rose from bed and wiped away the stains of solidarity
you left like an imprint of your lips on my sheets. Somewhere,
you're waking up in his arms and he holds you like you
are something delicate; a flower blossoming for the world
in his hands. I'm left wondering about the implications of
lotuses and inner peace as I stumble towards the microwave,
pretending it can give me instant gratification
the way my soul was exhumed from my body; your lips
pressed up against some mysterious orifice
that could release some false sense of catharsis.

I'm having my first smoke break of the day. It's been 96
hours since I last thought of inhaling carcinogens into my lungs
to forget about that venereal disease they call emotion. I
occasionally worry that this is less holy than the rest of my works,
sculpted out of abstractness as if my words were ethereal
instead of nebulous claims to immortality, some sort of verbal
invulnerability that breaks the way I got down on my knees
to hear you scream my name

baby, don't flatter me like that

I will stare straight through
through your myopic pretensions;

those honey-brown
lit-up-by-ambition
once-in-a-blue-moon-sapphire eyes

that wouldn't dare
make a difference in my life

so gaze airly at me;
ask me if I can stay the night with the
gold-flecked
gilded-age
black-hole
irises

that taught to wake up alone
'cause I learned by the way
you thrust yourself into my mind
to make you expendable

and baby,
I know
that you're
just

vain enough

to think that
this poem
is for you

i have yet again done something stupid

I broke the one promise
your closest friend taught me to keep

woke up next to hope and solidarity;
squinting through rose-colored shades
sifting the morning dew
through to my pupils
the way my thoughts
condensed into consciousness

your adamantium ate through me;
decayed my spirit the way that kryptonite
consumed your childhood aspirations

and you are not unbreakable;
I'm just more fragile than most
because my life lacks comic book heroes

... but i don't blame you

my words are too exhausted
to fight your attempts at lyricism

enervated by the desire for brevity
and instant gratification at your
fingertips that dance
on my lips like a muse

called my emotions together
like they needed a false sense of solidarity

an invocation for melodrama
to flow through my veins
like a poetic vice

A love letter to College Station

when I was still a young child,
you taught me that southern hospitality
and pennies at the base of statues
could bring me good fortune

fed me camaraderie for breakfast
when I woke up to the band in the morning

thrived on stack and the burning spirit
while I waited to reach maturity

watched couples walk together
under a tree that promised eternity

stood by at silent candlelight vigils
broken only by the sound of
21 gun salutes and solidarity

and baby, you can't even begin to comprehend
how long I have waited to marry you
with that golden ring upon graduation

the holy trinity

I don't mind the way I bled, accepted
the way my lips were kissed so hard
passion burst forth from capillaries
that were fueled by adrenaline

because each one of you tastes different,
and I want to write your life stories
with my tongue like I understand
what language your soul is speaking

she kisses like she wants to forget her past;
wraps her legs around me
like her body is a present,
and all she wants to do
is gift her innermost thoughts to me;
sends me messages through her chest
pressed up against my beating heart
so that her murmurs
cause mine to palpitate irregularly

and he bites with a ferocity
that makes me wonder
if he realizes the futility
of chewing through a concrete wall;
but he is determined to untangle
the bodies intertwined in front of him
as if one of us
was that missing puzzle piece
so he can pick up the shattered remnants of his poetry
and breathe life into his muses' lips again

but darling, three is two too many
and my lyrics are exactly both your stanzas too long
for me to wake up next to either of you
in the morning

99 problems

people have falsely denigrated me;
called me ms. anthropic, but my true surname
was plucked from my faith in the heavens;

scraped off the golden gates
like knees kissed by concrete

so I kissed away spirituality's childhood scabs
like it meant that I could find rose colored glasses
because back then, I retained the fierce optimism
of youth tempered by smooth elocution

but since then I have found that
my flaw is my Messiah complex;
complicated like religious differences
like reading psalms hidden within
prophecies about self-fulfillment

so I have given up on enlightening
in favor of preaching from a Bible
without divine guidance
lost myself in the missionary position;
abandoned hope kneeling by the bed

because darling,
you are just beyond saving
and baby, I'm not bitter
but you're just too fucking far gone
for me to revive

cross-hatched poetry

If nothing else, you taught me
how to walk myself out gracefully.
The dew is condensing on my face the way
my lips touched your eyelashes as I slipped away;
morning rays creeping towards my irises
because it is seven in the morning
and I have not yet taught myself
how to fall asleep in your arms,
have not given myself the opportunity
to let you push me away, but I know that

she's still on your mind
haunting you like a crick in the base of your spine
and I am building hidden innuendos and memories within
neglected lines I am confident you won't
ever read

east meets west

The smoke you exhaled around my face
curled around my nostrils the way Taipei air does
on a rainy day, and I hear stray motorcycles
in the distance. The fog penetrates through
iron gates that scarlet kissed with oxygen,
staining my fingerprints with the residue of nostalgia

Your namesake has British pretensions,
but you breathe out the forests of Wuhan
and her morning condensation flows through your veins
which makes me miss your colonization;
the way you took over my mind
with hazy fantasies I constructed like paper tigers

because I can still smell your dynasties
that you built up like great walls around a fortress
to protect yourself from girls like me, but baby,
my self-fulfilling prophecies aren't covered
by your insurance policies- I am invincible
and threw down our bones long ago; read
the back of turtle shells like I could predict
a self-determined future;
wrote symbols on your back with my nails
so you can forget me when you wake up
alone in the morning tomorrow.

why I don't stay the night

I rolled over and looked at her,
said, "baby, why won't you stay
because my love
has an expiration date
and I'm just waiting for you
to cash in your emotional investment
when I expire,"

so I stroked her hair and sighed,
running my fingers through infidelities
that blossomed on a wan face
that knew better than to fall in love,
because baby, we all die
alone

and baby, you're on your own

but my spirit
will always be two steps behind you

a lyrical response to little one

sweetheart, I am not that fragile
and you weren't the first to break me,
but I lack the piscean attributes
prescribed like a solution
to my problems

though I won't admit to giving astrology
that much credence to my life
because my character traits
are fickle like an inherent mis-dosage
in the time-release numbing capsules for my soul

since I have learned
that all good things wilt with time-
that spring is just a season that leads to the fallen in autumn
because Christmas morning still haunts me
like a lullaby I sing at night so I can't sleep

so I am done looking for happy endings
and settled for instant gratification instead
because darling, eternity can wait for me

messing around with wordplay

we spoke briefly on the phone today,
digits interweaving in invisible webs
while my fingers
caressed your voice through a telepathic connection
drawn out between our temples like a portrait

and I kissed your diction through the air;
worshiped your tongues like a deity
kneeling at the edges of altars
that sang benedictions about language
at your service the way that I
would serve you by wrapping my legs around you
in a heart beat

let drum and bass pulsate
through your veins; screw
and scratch
you like a record
from the deep south,
pick you like cotton until
the thorns ate my raw hands away

and I would be left with no way to call you

she dances on my heart like a flutter

You told me my poetry was beautiful,
but I do not write with words because my lips
are parched from kissing you too hard
on the longest night of my life, and I
have run out of lyricism and settled for brevity.
It's ironic, because I vomit out mellifluousness
the way the smell of morning coffee wakes me up.
You're already up and about,
carrying about the rest of your life without me,
and I carry on my shoulders bite (marks the spot
like an unfinished afterthought
between missing parentheses. My hang
over looms like a precipice I cannot step away from,
but our mo(u)rning never truly came
the way you shook between my legs,
because I stole away in the dark of the night;
kissed your eyelashes and took a heartbeat from you
while you were sleeping

and love, you've never even noticed that I still wake up alone.

when I first discovered America, I fell in love with the Wild Wild West

There is nothing evocative about your past
with me; I simply opened my eyes in the
greatest country on Earth. Your footsteps
defined the dust on the floorboards
as if solidarity's denotation
hid in the crevices of your boots. You
cocked the brim of your hat to the side
and it flashed its lopsided cowhide grin at me,
beckoning towards a genteel mannerism
Easterners will never fully grasp. I
surveyed your cracked brown hands the way
a farmer looks over a plot of land, and
you said, "honey, your words are parched
and it looks like your malaise is only 'cause
you lack a little lovin'." But I will remember
long summer days spent making love to iron horses
in your deserts, cooking stir fry in your melting pot
and chasing the ancestral ghosts of my racial identity
as if growing up in the only place where
chivalry has not died could somehow help me
to recall foreign memoirs written in my DNA.

But then you took my hand and kissed my fingertips,
opening doors for me in such a bowed manner
that I discovered opportunity