AHandfulOfSincereApologiesBecauseIt'sTheBestICanDo

The words I had carefully laced in my apology had barely left my lips
When I looked into her eyes.
She said nothing.

Her lips quivered like she was facing her darkest fears
In a nightmare she couldn’t escape…
The pain, too much to place into words
And in that moment, time stopped.
And I swear…I swear I could hear her heart
Fighting against the confines of her ribcage
Yearning for emancipation
From every blow it had ever taken

Each bruise from every leap of faith into unknown arms
Every ‘I love you’ and ‘forever and always’ sugar coating ulterior motives
Every mistake.
Mistakes she blames herself for
Thinking they were her fault.
But they never were.

Her eyes doing backstrokes in an ocean
She held it in
Saving her tears in the piggy bank under her eyes
Already filled to capacity with every regret she ever had
She saves them, trying to refill the trust fund
That experience had slowly diminished.

And it hurt more than anything she could ever say.

Her muted emotions
Interspersed through the silence of her gaze
The sound reverberated off eardrums and hollow walls
Because sometimes, silence is the loudest sound you can make.

For every word she refused to say
I died inside a thousand times
And all I could say was…”I’m sorry”
And I meant it with every fibre of my existence
Not just for everything I’ve done wrong
But a universal apology

An “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you that night”
Or “I’m sorry that somebody showed you the darkest side of men
And not the best that we have to give you.”
An “I’m sorry that my touch might remind you of his
And that he chained himself to your memories, and even the best of them can hurt”
“I’m sorry that even the most honest choose to hide behind the guise of a lie”
And “I’m sorry that my promises are fragile figurines
That I break like eye contact in staring contests because I’m afraid of getting lost in your eyes without breadcrumbs…”

But I always had the best intentions
Yet it breaks my heart that an apology is the best I can do.
I want to scream at the top of my lungs
Rage because I can do no better than to utter a few words
Words that anybody can say and not mean
I want to yell until you believe me that everything will be alright
That you are still perfect no matter what you hold against yourself
And what you’ve been through

And as I looked into her eyes
Tears ready to dive from her lashes
I realized that sometimes silence
Is the loudest sound you can make.

Salvation'sInTheCollectionBasket

I was born and raised a Catholic.
Brought up by an open-minded mom and a dad who displayed pious devotion to his faith, I thought I had the path to heaven paved for me.
But I’ve since learned that things hardly turn out the way they’re supposed to.
Because long gone are the days where I treated life as a game and the bible as the manual, trying to use its passages as passages to reach the kingdom. Trying to escape but I’m tired of it…I’m sick and tired of fools using Jesus as excuses for their ignorance.

So I wrote this poem, ballpoint to the point of breaking making indents on the cursed snake’s skin. With a pen I carved from the rib of Adam filled with the mistakes and regrets of the first lady…so I buried the forbidden fruit in the compost heap.

The religion’s latest dropout, but I’m finding my own way to get back in his good graces. But constantly I’m fighting the urge to fight with angels holding fiery swords and kick down the gates into paradise. But I can’t believe in it anymore..

Because if earth is hell, and hell is worse…
then everybody escaped to heaven and heaven was gentrified first.
So what if heaven had a ghetto?
Pearly gated communities with saints as security
So they trade their halos for wedding rings and offspring too naïve to listen to their parents when they tell them not to look down on the less fortunate that they donate their faith to every Sunday
While the rest live in thunderclouds
Drifting in public transit as they ride rays of light from state to state with tokens
And using condensation as train stations, commuting from rain drops to snowflakes
Taking express routes in the lightning.
Noses deep in hymn books, wearing frames that hold their vision like stained glass scenes in chapels praying that their prayers make the long journey across the street.
But as soon as they leave, they’re lining up down the block at the corner store holding food stamps for salvation but sincerity is long sold out.
Living off welfare, but they still don’t fare well, so they bid their farewells because love don’t live here.
Walking to perpetual Sunday school to witness devils doing drivebys and guardian angels duck and their wings shrivel in fear like they saw a deep fryer and they’re in lineups, trying to point out the kingpin but Satan’s in the shadows, smirk on his face laughing at how naïve we are..

Because we expect freedom and happiness, and clouds made of marshmallows and roads paved with gold, but what if nothing changes? What if the change we refuse to put in the donation basket that we keep telling ourselves we need is worth just as much as a prayer and a good deed, just tax deductible.
What if heaven had a ghetto and their system’s just as messed up as it is here and there’s nothing we can do about it? No programs, no donations, no change.
But even if that was the case…I’m leaving change and my own version of salvation in the collection basket..hoping you do the same.

IWantedToWriteALovePoem

I want to write the most amazing love poem. A love poem I could never dare dream of one-upping no matter how many times I replayed Super Mario Bros. or wrote to Santa asking for redo’s and cheat codes for creativity.

I want to make Christmas lists for secret Santa’s and cards for Cupid just so that I would get an opportunity to tell you the following things.
I want to understand you deeper than anyone else ever has.
I want to get lost in the maze inside of your fingerprints, or in the forest of filaments that is your hair shining like tungsten in light bulbs. I want my fingertips to tap dance a love poem in Morse code on the most sensitive part of your torso, to make your knees quiver like archer’s ammo and caress your skin to read your goosebumps like Braille and send electrical charges down the wires in your spinal cord.

I want seconds with you to feel like minutes, and minutes to feel like days, and days to feel like years because monthsaries are stupid….and I don’t understand why you’d even want to celebrate one.
Maybe because you can’t keep a relationship for even a year.
But believe me when I say I would work to keep you by my side until hell freezes over, or dinosaurs come back to life, or the zombie apocalypse happens, or robots take over, or aliens invade or…

You just don’t love me anymore.

But even then, I’d still toil like construction workers building a new foundation.
Because I don’t want to hold you in my arms…

I want to hide you on an island with me. Or a cryogenic chamber so that I could have you forever. The most delicate yet beautiful creature frozen in time like roses dipped in liquid nitrogen, playing hide and seek with the passing of time and the wilting of whispers of forever’s and murmurs of always.

I want to write a love poem about slipping that fluffy slipper on your foot at the stroke of midnight, because glass heels look uncomfortable. I want to Marty McFly to the exact second you were born and yell “DIBS!” to your parents for your hand in marriage for my infatuated and totally in love 25 year-old self. I want to play connect-the-dots with the stars and find an image of you.

I want you to be my inspiration, my muse. When I slave over my words to build a masterpiece like Egyptian slaves building pyramids, you can force me to keep going with simple flicks of your lashes…that frame your eyes like edges on a Scrabble piece worth one point but placed on a triple word square its worth gets multiplied from simple beginnings with so much potential.

I want to be so comfortable with you that I could tell you anything and everything.
Like how my arms are jealous of the way your blanket gets to stay wrapped around you every night. Or how my shoulders envy how your pillow gently holds your head while you dream about something other than me. Or how my compliments are jealous of the oxygen in your lungs, the way you accept it so gratefully and then it settles so close to your heart.

And I could tell there’s something wrong as soon as you say, “It’s nothing.” Because your problems are like tongues the way they remain hidden behind your smile, only being revealed if someone pays enough attention to look closely. Or when they’re forced out of your mouth by necessity like a gag reflex. Then I would type my apologies and words of comfort on tablets of vitamins and Tylenol hoping they would make you feel better.

I want to write a list of everything I want and see how you react to it, then maybe I would read it on stage, or read it to you in private, or just send it to you with a "Sincerely yours," but really I just want you to get the message.
I want to tell you all of this…but I can’t. So I wrote it in a love poem.

ComplimentsAndACompleteLackThereof

I've since stopped giving girls compliments.

Because no matter what I tell you, you never believe me. Like you’ve been conditioned to think that I would make this shit up when I don’t really believe it. But I do.
And I don’t say these things to get in your pants. That’s far from my plans, like the Millennium Falcon landing in that asteroid with that giant worm that almost swallowed them whole. It’s not something I want to happen. But I digress.
See, you think you’re just okay or anything less than. But I think you’re the cutest thing I’ve ever seen and I just wish that you could see yourself through my eyes. Because to me, you’re cuter than Siberian husky puppies playing a game of tag with baby giant panda bears.
Think of an 80 year old married couple holding hands in the park like they were right out of the last scene of The Notebook. Or actions from A Walk To Remember, but with me doing all of them to you, to the specifications of your own bucket list. And yes that includes naming a star after you, because I will totally do that for you.
From a baby’s first words amid incoherent noises and babble to words crafted by poets that can make entire audiences go “Awwwww.”
You’re cuter than that.
Imagine chubby children running in playgrounds with dimpled, clenched fists and a toothless smile so full of joy that it could make you wish you were a parent already.
You’re cuter than all of that.
Now think of the most adorable thing that’s ever existed.
Yep. You’re still cuter.
See, you’re the reason that I wish I wasn’t a poet, but an artist. Because words can’t come close to describing how you look to me. But I can’t paint, sculpt or draw…
So I’m stuck here wishing that I could speak every language in the world. Just so that I could tell you how beautiful you are everyday in a different dialect. Hoping that it would convince you that you are much more than just okay because the entire world has their own way of calling you beautiful. And the bonus is that I would never sound cliche.
But then again, I’ve already stopped giving girls compliments.

MakeLove

"Let's make love."
One sentence that will never roll off my tongue and come out of my mouth.
I will never “make love”, because I don’t know what love is made out of.
So what if I don’t have the building tools? No, T-square to take the right angles at a-cute actions while I plan out the blueprints from the get-go. Or a metre stick just to see if it measures up to what we expected. You flash a smile, eyes contact and I beam…but it’s a shallow replacement for a concrete foundation and I-beams. But I’m no architect.
And what if I don’t have metres worth of PVC? But all that does is turn the whole relationship into nothing more than a pipe dream of what we wish it would turn into. Wishing that the wooden panels keep the frame of the relation-ship steady in the tide instead of creating walls between us. Because the insulation in these hollow walls don’t do well to keep the warmth inside when the frigid air seeps in between us, and the love starts escaping…little by little. So I’m wishing that I wouldn’t need to rely on a hammer, nails and glue to keep it together when the shit starts falling apart. Because I’m no carpenter.
Or what if it’s not the question of how to make love, but about what we can make out of it? Like “love” is just a bunch of pieces that interlock like Lego’s or jigsaw pieces to make up the bigger picture? That would totally make sense because love never had instructions or a recipe laminated in the box it came in. It was something that people just took in their hands to try to create something beautiful out of.
Not beautiful for everyone else…but something that they saw as beautiful, like Pygmalion crafting a statue. And all of a sudden, they’re in love with love.