moon-browed

[moon-browed]

You always look at me out of the corner of your eye.

I exist only in your peripheral, a ghost that you dare not look at, lest it not be a trick of the light.

I linger, there, almost out of sight, existing under only the most perfect of circumstances.

You used to look at me, remember?

I wrote a poem about it. You never read it and never will.

They say the guitar is one of the most sensual instruments.

Show me. Let me feel your fingertips against my strings, your steady palm against the wood. Play the melody of my voice under your touch, hear it reverberate.

You can touch me softly or you could struck me with all your might, and both sounds would be music.

I am in my childhood house and all I want to do is write to you. The letter would only need to travel across the table, and yet somehow that distance is enough for you to never receive it. Who would've thought, the distance that love cannot survive is the width of a table.

[moon-browed]

19

And yes I know you have to move away at some point but maybe don't move too far? And I guess I'm asking of you to send me some pictures when you'll be away on your conferences because you know the pink sky is my favorite. You remember, right, the story of when I was little.

Do you remember?

What I'm trying to say is that I do still hate phone calls but I would always pick up if it was you calling. And maybe what I want to say is that there are songs that I cannot listen to anymore but still I press play sometimes because I guess the pain of remembering is better than the numbness of forgetting, and in my memories I still hold you in my arms and I am still alive and your eyes hide between the beats and I guess that makes me feel a little less alone.

And I do feel safe in your arms, I promise, my secret is that I don't flinch at the sounds exactly I flinch because the sounds remind me there's a world out there and that world is a place where I am away from you which is to say a world I don't want to be a part of. Maybe that is a little dramatic?

And yes of course I'm glad you have survived this so I think what I keep getting stuck on is that maybe I don't want to survive you or at least I won't be glad if I do but I can't say that right that's silly right that's just so childish and maybe it's just my suicidal ideation right and honestly maybe I should talk to someone about this, right?

I guess all I can do is keep the scar as a souvenir.

Journey before destination but what if I didn't care about the destination in the first place? And I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have written poems and every word seems to be about you and I guess what I'm asking is if I were to show you would this maybe become clearer or would it just add to the muddiness of it? And I guess what I'm asking is that if you knew about the poems would you want to read them and why? And maybe just maybe it makes me a little sad that you might never see them because what is art if the muse is already halfway through the door? And I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I am all over the place and what kind of writer loses their prose and mixes up words for feelings and full stops for semicolons? Oh but please you must forgive me because my mind now races at the speed of your heartbeat and thinks with the rhythm of your laughter and maybe that could be okay, please please please let it be okay.

And yes the time is borrowed and we were out of it the moment I felt how it feels to caress your cheek but I think I'll never forget the precise brown of your eyes and I have counted the white hairs on your head and keep the number as a lucky charm and that must count for something.

And you once told me that you would love me no matter what so excuse me if I lose my thoughts in the crevices of your dimples but I can't help but shake a little as I carve my heart out and present it to you, this frail and wretched and soft and silly little thing of mine but I guess it's my fault that it leapt to you, and what are you even supposed to do with such a thing either way?

I don't know what I want or what I'm asking of you but I do know that I'm scared I'm so scared because I fear that if you looked at me like you could maybe love me, I may even drop everything and howl at your door a poor man. Or maybe I won't, but in the moments of my hesitation you'll be able to see it in my eyes. And I know, I know we are just pretending, we pretend we don't see the big dead end sign glaring at us below the night lights and we blame it on the speed at which we are traveling and we tell ourselves a good joke to keep our minds off of it so I guess what I am trying to say is that I would still ask you to take your foot off the gas and lock the doors.

[moon-browed]

I know what you think of me.

I know that you think of me as something wild, and untamed, and dark. I know that you think of me as something with sharp edges and corners, something that once you touch it, its only retribution will be your blood on its surface.

I know why. I know that I've tried oh so hard to make everyone believe that I am blood and craze. I know.

My love for you drags like a dead body behind me.

It clings to my heels, and I feel like Achilles, sharing the one vulnerable spot of our entire body. Still, even if it destroyed me, I wanted to love you.

I am going to die with this, aren't I?

You confuse the monster, and that is something unique to you. One day, the monster spits out your name like a slur, like a bloody clump of my soot infested lungs. The other, it digs its claws into my back when I dare to think about finally letting go.

Alas, I am not done loving you. Even if it destroyed me, I wanted to love you. I think I'd do a good job, despite despite despite.

Come now my love, can't you hear my voice getting softer? I am belly up for you right now. Come now, make me into something better than myself. Turn me into art. You know I deem myself above begging. But we both know that no matter what I do, all I ever say to you is please. See me, witness me before the end. Come now, the end might come sooner than you think. If you blink you might miss it.

[moon-browed]

Ah, my mind is getting heavy now.

I can feel it push against my temples, weighing down my spine, rendering my shoulders sore. No matter how intently and viscously you rub them, the problem is somewhere else entirely.

There is an infestation of serpents in the attic of my brain. I can feel them, you know. Crawling, slithering, pushing against my cranium to the point of madness.

I must be going mad, I think.

The monster, this poor thing trapped inside of me, cradles my head and squeezes. I do not know why. Does it not have survival instincts? Doesn't it know, if I go, so does it?

Truth be told, I do not know if that is true.

Maybe the monster is something much bigger than me, some primordial force that will live long after I pass. Maybe the monster is all that will be left of me when I die. Maybe people will forget the color of my eyes, the hue of my hair and how it changes during summertime. They won't know about my poems, the tenderness I was capable of, once, the way I loved into creation of a language divine.

Maybe in their memories I will be bloody fur and claws.

Maybe what I leave behind will be nothing but wounds and ache. What are monsters, after all, but wounds that learned to walk?

Gods, what a fate. Such is the power of a monster born out of something sacred, I suppose. It was never supposed to hunt, you know. It was never supposed to attack. But, I guess, with enough time and erosion, even a shield can turn into an axe.

My dreams sound awfully like fantasies now. Childlike, naïve, silly, and most importantly, I do not care for them anymore. It is, a little bit, as if something a bit too important finally died inside my sternum.

Lean closer now. I am growing tired. I can feel the slowness settling in, the weight, the heaviness of it all.

It is quiet in the chambers of my chest. It is so quiet, there is no sound but the disfigured thumping of a heartbeat. Thump, thump, thump. An unfamiliar sound, one that I feel quite uncomfortable with. Although, I do feel quite uncomfortable with most things these days.

It is June, and the heat rises, and my chest grows heavy. My words are failing me, my dear, and I am counting down the days.

My brother jokes, and laughs, before he asks me not to leave him, and I can't help but feeling a little unsettled by how his words simply… Do not reach me anymore.

I stopped being afraid yesterday. That cannot be good, can it?

Everything is far, far away now. It all shines through stained glass, I see in colors, and the noise is drowned out.

Lean closer now. I stopped being afraid yesterday.

[moon-browed]

In another universe, I know that you don't sigh in relief when I leave your room. In another universe, I can make you love me, and I write no poems. In another universe, I hear your voice through the phone line, and I can tell you that I hear the smile in it. I am less my parents and you are more you. You hold my hand and the moon is not the only witness. I can look at you without it being a confession. In another universe you say it back. You say it back.

[moon-browed]

"I am thinking about starting my medication again"

You pause. You look up at me, and I see your jaw clenching for a moment. We both know what I am telling you. "It's bad again. The bathroom floor calls to me and I fear I will not be able to resist it on my own. It's bad again, and this is the closest I'll ever get to tell you that I am afraid."

You look at me, and you do not speak for a few moments. I can see it, the question, floating behind warm chocolate brown eyes, I see it in the furrowing of the dark of your eyebrows.

Without me even realizing, I am trying to memorize your face again. Just in case. Just to be safe. You look at me, and I know you want to ask me what you asked me on that chilly October night : "Do you want to die?" But we both know how it ended last time. With me underneath your hands, and our voices a little too soft for a friendship.

You look to the side. You are beautiful. You are encapsulating. I am a moth and you are such a sweet bright thing.

You choose the diplomatic answer, like I knew you would. I try to guess if you know. If you know that I am telling you to brace yourself for the worst. If you know that I am telling you that I might break the promise I made in your bed. If you know that I tried, but I may fail.

You look at me, and you are beautiful, and I am choking up with words too worrying to speak out loud.

I smile, and you smile back, and we continue eating.

You make me laugh, and I have this terrible feeling that there won't be many more times of this. Of me laughing at something you said, but keeping my eyes fixed on your face, on the joy you paint on your features when you get a real giggle out of me.

I keep having visions of the past. The way you told me that you deserve to exist because you made me happy for a moment. The way I told you that, I can't explain how, or why, but I know it to be true, that you deserve to exist just because you do.

A kiss on the cheek.

The brush of a hand.

My fingers tracing your features in the dead of night, mapping your face, the valleys of your dimples.

Your laugh, your voice softening, an "I miss you" text.

I miss you too.

I'll miss you, too.

[moon-browed]

There's surely some symbolism in the way you have never let me cook for you.

I am music in a kitchen, I spin ingredients like a spell and mix flavor like an alchemist. You could give me scraps, pieces of food that couldn't connect before they met my hands (I am good at salvaging things that don't want to be saved, you see.)

I am God above my stove, and my food becomes my religion, and its acceptance my faith (what does it mean if you refuse to take communion? I am offering something sacred and it is met with a closed mouth.)

I made you soup, once, in a life far away. You were sick, and had not eaten, and it was instinctive. It was a cheap one, pre-made, I only added water and heat. (In a way, that was the only time I allowed myself to stand imperfect in front of you. Love demanded it, you see, and I may be God but I am a good disciple, too.)

I will never forget your eyes when I gave you the sad little bowl of something akin to blasphemy to me. You told me months later that nobody had ever done such a thing for you before.

I wanted to scream. Let me get it right. Let me show you what it means to be an avalanche of flavors, let me show you what it means for a chef to love feed you.

You never let me. You never allow me to show you my true colors, the true flavor that I can serve to you on a golden platter.

If I diluted myself into just water and heat, would you taste me then?

[moon-browed]

My bathroom is the only room in my house where the floor is not wood. I've decided that there is meaning to that.

Do not go back there. The tile is too cold and rigid for you to lie on. That floor was never your house, it has never welcomed you with warmth and sandalwood scent. Its cold teeth and concrete hands were never meant to hold a body. Do not go back there. You are grown and your bones can't endure it again. The lies it whispers will work and you will not survive the night. Stay in the sun. Do not go back there.

[moon-browed]

The song of love comes from the gritting of teeth.

In my dreams I sew buttons on the inside of my lips and line my teeth with pure metal.

My mother calls me a star and I have no heart to tell her that she sees the light but not the death. I am a dead thing shining. I spare my own life to save hers but I am a selfish thing.

I walk in the streets of this city because statistically it's more likely to be hit by a car than to die in your sleep.

I have written the letters and I find myself drowning in guilt at the one that begins with "Dear mum,". To be alive out of nothing but guilt, it does sound like something a star would do.

I joke, and I laugh, and you know that I am begging for help that I cannot accept. And you look at me with those worried eyes and I avoid your gaze because I am so sorry. I am so sorry.

Do stars crave death? Does a lifetime on fire tire them out as well?

You've told me that my conception was a miracle, a one in a million. Miracle and Mistake sound awfully alike, do they not?

They ask me what would make me happy, what would make me smile again, and my mind goes dark. I remember being happy, in a dream, someplace far away, in a different world, in a different life. Not in this one. Not in this one.

It's like a game where you know you're going to lose and you're just waiting for the clock to stop ticking so that you can try again, take it from the top.

I am tired and injured and breathless.

You tell me that I have a bright future ahead of me, and I think of burning until I am one with the earth.

My writing becomes sloppy and tired and I am running out of metaphors.

I look at you and every single word I tell you is laced with an apology in advance. You trust me, you always have, and you've always been wrong.

I try to bribe myself, try to push the due date, but nothing seems that important when everything is so still. "I need to learn how to play the piano, I have paid for vacation tickets, I don't want to make someone sad before summer, things will be better when you'll start your practice, things will get better, things will get better, thi-".

I feel like a mutilated, sick thing.

I feel fungi growing in the crevices of my brain, in the ligaments of my hands. What do I do with this rotting thing? What do I do with this body that goes through all the right motions out of sheer muscle memory?

The heat is unbearable, it makes carcasses smell even worse than they normally do. I carry perfume everywhere I go and I keep everyone away but for how much longer will I be able to ignore it?

I try to be a good person and good people don't snatch kids from their mothers.

I try to be good. I try to be. I fail many times, but I haven't taken my mother's kid, and that has to count for something, doesn't it?

It must mean something. All this misery, this fatigue.

I have to believe it means something.

[moon-browed]

You say my name and the sound is like nails against a blackboard. The monster in my chest purrs and coos, but all I want to do is apologise for making you utter such an awful sound, for filling your mouth with the terribleness of me. You say my name and it is both a choir and a guttural scream, and I would cover my ears if it wasn't for the fact that it's your voice, and I'm always worried it'll be my last time hearing it, so I take your every word in. Even my name. I spend most of my time floating in a walking corpse, but when you call to me, it's like you're forcing me back into the carcass, and the soul cannot bear the feeling of flesh rotting. I let you nonetheless. What is my love if not self erasing? What is your love if not forcing me to open my eyes? In another universe, you say my name and it only means my name. You call to me and it is not a war cry. I call to you and you answer.

[moon-browed]

He kisses and devours and I close my eyes and think of you but all it does is make the rot in my chest grow wilder like a forest fire.

How do you deal with it? The loss. Losing you feels like I am losing myself, and surely that can't be right.

My love is consuming, a vortex that swallows and swallows and swallows.

I love like a medic on a battlefield. Fast, urgent, bare handed, with a very specific kind of desperation. The desperation of saving something unsalvageable. Of course it is messy. Of course there is blood everywhere.

He kisses me and holds me and I taste the sweetness of the liquor and I shut my eyes very tightly and try to stop thinking about how your kisses didn't taste of anything but you, the only thing I want to taste, the one thing I want to devour.

I try to find solace in foreign arms but all it does is remind me of what I once almost had. The monster growls : what you took away. I don't want to think like that. You could not belong to me like I did to you and it's no one's fault, I think. I couldn't get you to leave your suitcase, but how could I ever hate you for it?

I loved in that bus. I loved in that bed. I loved in the streets of a city that has never known the kid behind my eyes (I try to kill it every time I blink.)

You made me that. You made me love, even if you had no stomach for it, you could not deal with the stench, the growling of the monster. How can I blame you for that? How can I blame you for anything at all?

You reach for the monstrous holding a knife behind your back just to be sure, and how could I ask you to be tender with it? How can I ask you to not shiver at the empty eyes? How how how...

How do I live with this? I don't know what to do with it either.

How does one keep going, when tenderness is an impossibility? When being visible is against their nature? Being seen not a part of the structure of their DNA.

How does one keep going? How do I?

[moon-browed]

No matter what you've told me, I still wish we had met sooner. I wish we played together as kids, and fought to the point of tears. There would've been beauty in that, too.

[moon-browed]

I am standing right in front of you.

The sun is hitting your face just right and you just giggled at something stupid I said. You are looking at me and it almost feels like everything is someplace far away.

I cannot look away. I think, for a moment, that I'll break.

I get worried that I'll open my mouth and say it. I'll just say it, I'll put it into words into the same space that you are in, and it will forever be there, and you'll have heard it, and I won't be able to laugh it off because you are looking at me and you can tell when I'm lying.

And my heart rate is speeding way past the limit and my cheeks are flushing pink and I know because you are looking at me and I see the twitch in your brow that you get right before you ask me what is up.

But you are looking at me. You don't need to ask. You already know, so you're smiling, and there's a beat of silence, of acknowledgment.

I think I live in these silences, in the little spaces between full stops and capital letters, and that is why I must remain small.

It is with great shame that I can honestly say that living in these silences makes dying every other moment worth it. It is with shame I admit that you make me happy by merely existing, no matter how much you crave to see me bleed.

Right now, the sun is hitting your face just right, and you just giggled at something stupid I said, and you are looking at me, and the words are on the precipice of my lip.

Instead, I tell you to travel safely, and to keep me updated. You say you will send pictures. There is no poetry, no sonnet.

You already know. I do too.

The rest is just noise.

[moon-browed]

why do you always write about love?

Is there anything else to write about?

[moon-browed]

Search history of a rotten body

07:09

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[moon-browed]

The monster is dying.

Sometimes I call to it, try to get it to escape my ribs, a twisted sense of melancholy. I feel its heavy feet dragging, I feel its breath hollow and labored. It crawls at my feet and I look at it and for a moment I consider it to be a good thing. And the next, I am on my knees, sobbing, screaming, scratching at it, fur and dry blood underneath my fingernails.

A God is nothing without their believer. (I find it harder and harder to bring it back.)

The monster whimpers and cries out, and I join it, "I know, I know" I whisper to it and our voices are indistinguishable. I don't know what to do with my hands anymore.

I Google how to bury a dead animal in a concrete city, and I know that there is poetry to be found in that but I refuse to look for it. My phone's autocorrect doesn't predict "love you" after I type "I" anymore, and I try to ignore what that means. (It predicts "don't know" now.)

I parade my belief, "I am here to love as much as I can" while biting my tongue when the monster says that I don't even know how to do that.

The monster howls and screams in bitter triumph when it gets proven that flowers thrive once they get ripped from my garden. The soil is poisoned, sterile, and a kid cries in the distance about the flowers slowly dying.

I ask the monster how to be happy that they are blooming, even if away from me, and it softly opens its jaws, its mouth perfectly shaped to hold my heart in it. ("let me eat it" it says "let me eat it and make my stomach a museum. You won't feel it - you won't feel anything - but at least something will remember")

It is a scary thing to swim in the dark of night, I scream and beg for help as I drown and they tell me it's not their fault nobody taught me how to swim.

The monster is dying.

With each lost tooth and broken nail, I feel myself slipping away, deeper and deeper in a lake of everything soft and sweet. I shake at the weight of the will I wrote in December, sitting heavy in my box of memories. I know that nobody will think to look for it there, and the monster whimpers at the reminder that nobody would risk ever actually knowing us.

(He uses every weapon I've ever given him to poke the monster, and it works, and the muzzle is about to break, and I fear what I will become once it's off.)

The monster is dying and it sounds more and more like my father as it does.

I think the most horrible of things and I fear that I am something far worse than him (his daughter).

The monster is dying with your hands around its throat (I had a dream about this). I told you months ago I had a dream where you killed me and I died with a smile. Would that be enough to convince you that my dreams are warning signs?

Every person that cried out love for me keeps biting and tearing at any tender flesh that has remained, and all I can muster is an apology for tasting so bitter.

There is violence in every kind of love I've laid eyes on, and I fear that one day I won't have any bones left to withstand it. How can love birth such hate? It is an unfair trade, isn't it? Love for one person, hate for so many.

I don't hate her, per se. I only hate the way your eyes light up when you speak of her, how your voice softens, how I can feel your heart skipping a beat. I hate how you stabbed me with one hand and held her with the other.

I hate how she's perfect. Her fingers are not yellow from the nicotine, her skin is not pale from lack of sleep, she doesn't reek of alcohol and cigarettes and decay, she is witty and smart and beautiful and I am a monster (howling howling howling) and I am afraid one day I will open my jaws and devour everything in sight and it will be out of love but does it even matter?

Does this even matter? How many poems will it take? How many well crafted words and metaphors, how many hours spent thinking of monsters and empty beds?

How many rotten flowers will I have to cough up before I can finally put the monster to sleep again?

The monster is dying and I refuse to bury it.

Is that what love is? To hold onto things suffering and stroking their fur and singing them lullabies? Is that what my love is? A broken garden full of maggots? A wooden bench infested by mushrooms singing a eulogy?

[moon-browed]

There is something to be said about the tenderness of the gold found underneath a girl's eyes.

The body is an echo chamber and soundproof, nothing that happens inside can be heard into the next room.

The softness of fingernails scratching against your back, tracing moles into constellations, making you the night sky, making you God.

There is something to be said about the composition of tears, the anatomy of crying. About a knock going unanswered. If we look at people as rooms, where would your door lead? What does the answer mean? What are your walls made of? Did you build them?

I am an awful awful thing, a writer with no book, an artist with no canvas, a poet whose muse has turned to (or maybe always has been) stone. A dreadful thing, the wasting of potential. To live as a corpse in motion, to serve purposes beyond my noise.

Can you see? Can you see God behind my pupils, angels in my iris? Can you taste charcoal and soot when you kiss me, red lipstick smudging against your lips?

If you press your ear against my ribcage, will the sound be mechanical, cold iron and steel pumping gasoline into a machine no one has bothered to tune? It's called a cage for a reason. A prisoner in my own mind, I run in circles in a copper field until my feet bleed.

You don't listen you don't listen you're not listening.

My throat is splitting open by screams that fall on ears worse than deaf. I swear my doorstep reeks of rotten flesh and you ask how I know it to smell sweet. I tell you I grew up with it and you do not question me, you question everything but the things that I tell you when no one else is listening. What kind of syndrome is it for a suspect to beg their interrogator to say something? You want to study the mind, the soul, anyone's but mine and I find myself with white knuckles and shattered teeth.

I am an animal in captivity that would die in its natural habitat, a wretched thing, a perfect equation of tragedy.

I am good at holding my tongue, it's been in my hands for years and there is a safety that comes in that isn't there? You attempt to stitch it back in place and I hate that you pretend to know what that entails.

I am a tired beast, heavy and dragging, knotted fur and teary eyed. You do not listen.

You ask me to be better but you do not know I am not a living thing. The necrosis has started to spread to my brain, each day a lost battle, each night I close my eyes a fantasy, my bedsheets a veil, my bed a casket. Corpses do not evolve. They rot. They decompose. They decay. They smell sweet. They fester and bring disease, they pollute the waters and attract parasites.

When you stand next to me, how do I smell? Isn't it sweet?