Love poem: Casualties

Welcome to my poetry website! Pink poems are love poems & blue poems are more general “life” poems. Each poem is interrupted by photographs and ends when you’ve reached the subscribe/soundcloud portion. xx

Love poem: Casualties

We were driving alongside an emerald beach and I was
Filming a TikTok video of the water, as the waves reached a height that
Didn’t scare me, and suddenly
I looked down & there was water in the car
We were driving through the water
I could breathe
I couldn’t breathe
I could breathe
I was asleep
I couldn’t breathe
Like dandelions
Picked at the wrong time

There were no problems
And we were free
Free to be ourselves, free to get wrapped up in each other
Not constrained by the world propaganda or what’s playing on the news
Television set out of our reach
(Do you even own a television?)
Keyboard in the kitchen sink
Fragrant butterflies

Nape of your neck
Upset stomach
Belly aches for you

There have been nothing but problems
Just me tossed up in you, cradled like the darkest blue
Until we wake up
Foggy skies, hear me out
I’m well familiar with ambivalence
Am very good at counting chirality centers in molecules
Though, when the numbers are in front of me
I wonder if in a different life
I could add them up and find you, again
We’d be soft and innocent
Like dandelion breath
I wouldn’t have to bruise your ego

What would you do
Blank, empty face
I’m well familiar
Can sequence a genome, but can’t figure out how to tell a boy that
I wanted to be the place he calls home

(He’d know if he read my poetry
He’d know if he was in love with me)

Figment of my imagination
Heart palpitations
Misguided communication
On repeat, wouldn’t dare to press rewind
Fast-forward through the archive of my mind
A baby that takes several years to be born
Fully formed
A landscape of an intoxicating tornado with a sunny portrayal of graciousness

What are you indebted for?
When you’re not standing at my front door
Blue ribbons in my hair
A long, pink, satin dress that I
Planned
For the
Occasion

Where I
Would be
Alone
With my patience
Watching little kids chase after their parents
Watching little kids chase after their
Watching little kids chase after
Watching little

Kids holding rose petals
Speaking in Spanish that I understand
Now
How
We
Were

Meant to fall apart so casually

Just like that
We go back
To the places we call home
And we pretend
To not
Care

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Lilac love poem: Noise (across the room)

Lilac love poem: Noise (across the room)

I can’t fall in love with you if you’re across the room from me

But I can’t change you
Been so endlessly patient with you
Waiting for the thunderstorm to clear, yet a new one comes in hot
Shows me my fears
Pours hot coffee all over me
Covered

I bit my inner lip
Overflowing with an unwelcoming anxiety
Until both the insides of the top and bottom started to bleed
& as the blood poured in
Filling the tiny spaces between my teeth
I could taste the iron &
I felt closer to myself
Than I did
Looking in your bathroom mirror
Wondering why the tiles on the floor have to be so nice
The bathtub so luxurious, so unused
A pitfall of possibilities & potential
Thought I was steering towards irrationality
But all it was
Was hope
& isn’t that familiar
Isn’t that something I could dissolve deeply into

I realized, there was nothing to save
If I could just have that museum day
Back & I’d be on time & you’d see that I’ve been waiting what feels like my whole life
To look into somebody’s eyes & feel safe

But this empty space –
This is not the place
These are the alleyways your parents warned you about
The Instagram posts about what red flags to look for
Suddenly you’re driving and cannot stop thinking
About how someone doesn’t have to necessarily be a bad person to still be unfulfilling to you
I swallowed that truth
It’s all a girl like me can do –
One who dreams in pink
Prays every second she blinks
Doesn’t ever let spiders go down the sink

Unless they want to
Unless they beg me to
Then, what am I to do?

This
Is me
Letting go
Of you

It’s all
A girl
Like me
Can do

I can’t fall in love with you if you won’t walk across the room towards me

I can’t
Take the noise
Out of your head

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Poem: Polite (alone)

Poem: Polite (alone)

Be gentle with yourself
Your graceful little steps
Lavender ribbons in your hair
Pulling a drive-by at the car wash
Infuriating all of your closest friends
Tugging on the rips in your jeans, hoping that when the fabric bursts at the seams
You will pave the way for new daydreams
& life will be plentiful
Once upon a time

Like lock and key,
I thought you were made for me
But I was made for more
Than what this world has to offer

Inside we are all vulnerable
Deserving of kindness
But God isn’t always so polite.
A penchant for
Throwing stones at your door
My fingers appear as though they have suffered frostbite

Chewing on a plastic straw
I thought that I had gone too far
But then I noticed –
I had not moved at all
Weaving a new daydream
Absorbing my most fragile insecurities
And thinking they might be the reasons someone wonderful will fall in love with me

What would that be like?
I thought I had it in another life
When our spines reached the corners of the bedroom
That we had painted the most ethereal blue
I had ever intoxicated myself with, out of sheer hospitality
For the fiber network of my musculoskeletal orchestration
A girl in a sundress
The middle of winter
Taking my gloves off to text him back
Frostbite
Frostbite

Needless to say
I buy one pack of Parliaments per day
Just to never
Just to never
Just to never run out
Because what if I
Because what if I
What if I were to run out
Find you in the middle of the intersection
Screaming for help on a bookshelf
That you built yourself

Then, what would I do?
Coat you in ethereal blue?
I’d display all the facts that I contain in my porcelain doll frame, regarding the closest moon

Or find myself at home
With nobody on the phone
The concrete entering my residence like it’s testing my weightlessness

Paint me diamonds, buy me charcoal
Unravel me on purpose
With potential
To be
In a picture frame with me

This is
How
I remain
Alone

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Love poem: Lily pad

Love poem: Lily pad

I don’t want to put my cards all over the table
Though I’m dying to show you what’s true
How real this significance is
My significant other

Sitting on my lily pad
You know I’m the only one that can get you to relax
Move in slow motion
I’m heavenly reserved
& I know you don’t do these things on purpose
But the caffeine in this Earl Grey tea
It’s making me nervous
I know you don’t do it on purpose

Swaying with myself in my bedroom
I can be violent if you turn the heat up
No longer desperate to be enough
I’ve got a sweetness concave within me
A fruit I only bear to those that can hold it
Tight

Pushing all my buttons
Convincing myself I kind of love it
Have I shown you what’s at the bottom of the sea?
Underneath all the make-believe

I don’t want to have to ask if you missed me!
I’m getting run over by the same train over and over again
My eyes close when I drive & I don’t even mind
Collect my cigarettes in an empty coke can
Police on a motorcycle
Firearms in my trunk
No longer desperate to be enough
I keep trying to make it to the bottom of the sea
But something pulls me back above
I want you to drown with me
If you do
Make sure I drown too

Don’t read into my words
Don’t touch me softly, then make it hurt
A one-way ticket to my favourite Chicago Transit Authority stop
Where I am free to walk around
I don’t need bells and whistles
I need the fogginess to stop

A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
When I sleep
A rose that blooms
On repeat

I want you to drown with me
When I get off my
Lily pad

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Love poem: Perfectly real (really perfect)

Love poem: Perfectly real (really perfect)

Suddenly
The impetus is on me
To be perfect, so perfect, for you again
Satin & lavender bedsheets
Fresh clothes from the dryer
Neurons that synapse when the clock resets

But I can’t
Withstand
Dissonance
I can’t
Bear to
Live with regret
I can’t
Break free from
This tangled fishnet
The wire digging its claws directly into my spine

Disengagement when separated
Disregarded how you said maybe
Perhaps it’s my own agenda that
I failed to write out in black ink
My own handwriting looks foreign to me
The flowers in my apartment have finished dying
I closed the curtains, but someone is waiting
To see me burn out like I’ve been on fire this whole time

Carving my name into my solitude
Changing the location of a confined venue
I don’t like this dress
Don’t like how I look in it
Want you to tell me I inspire you to stop playing make-believe
Wish you would bring me roses & be gentle with me
Not let me lose any more sleep

I’m not really writing
I’m scared of defining
How lazy I’ve gotten at building my self-esteem
The ships are all sinking
The pilot keeps blinking
& the leftovers have spoiled because real things are only real in real time

So I hit “unsend”
Spend the afternoon in my garden
Playing with my own hair, saying your name to myself

I can’t even ask you
What you meant when you said nothing
Because I know myself to get in the way of what could be

I’ll trace my ashes
In long cylinder glasses
Faking a proof-of-concept of a girl who takes pride in the way she carries herself

Now I’m scared of writing
Because I don’t like what I see
And that holds far too much meaning to me

I’m sick of trying
To act like I haven’t been
Crying myself to sleep

Tell me I’m perfect
Say that you missed me
Step into my four-chambered studio where the pianos lack keys
& the guitars have no strings
We can dissolve into anything we want life to be

Tell me you missed me
Without lying to me
Tell me I’m perfect
Because you can see how I dream
Tell me you loved how
I didn’t seem desperate
To find in my own self what you’ve found in yours

I’ll rearrange my bedroom
Work on shifting my patterns
So that the stillness in your settings can bleed into me

Tell me I’m perfect
Without lying to me
Reach for me when I’m drowning
In my make-believe sea
Allow me to realize there’s more to let go of
More in life to make sense of
More in this life to see

When you’ve regained stability
Found blue-green lakes filled with clarity
Then, you can come back to me

I’ll be in my garden
Telling myself
That I don’t have to be perfect to be something real

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