Birthmarks

If it’s true that birthmarks tell me where I died in my past lives, shouldn’t they be called deathmarks? And what will happen in my millionth life? Will I be flesh or will I be just scattered spots of all my sufferings? And when I see a baby born without ridges or dents, is that a first birth? A first life? But when I examine myself, I cannot remember what I was born with and what had piled on over the years. How many birthmarks can I have before I die infinitely? How can our battered bodies endure so many deaths? Can a babe be older than the two hundred year old? I think so, if they’ve been through so many reincarnations that they cannot count them all. Is there where wisdom comes from? The ends and the beginnings? And what happens when your birthmarks become your deathscars? Does your soul get ripped apart by the echoes of your last breath? Maybe this is where cynicism and sadness comes from — from the bullet wounds and the hanged nooses, from the broken hearts and the sounds of jutted starts. My hands trace my body and try to count all my breaths. How many parents and children have I had? How many mistakes have ruined the world for me? Was I someone famous? Or was I the beggar on the streets? How many people have I loved and how many people have I lost?And the only mark on me is in my mind, as I ask the same question over and over again: how can our battered souls endure so many lives?

Fall

I used my heartbeat as a countdown as I waited with frozen breath for the freefall. I felt like everyone was watching with me — waiting for the world to collapse on itself and let us out, like air out of a bag. I grew up afraid of vertigo as much as I was afraid of heights; I caught flies in my fears and never felt as alone as I did looking up at the clouds. They all jumped up there — the dancing dreamers and the kids who could make shapes out of nothing. I shuddered at the incessant whispers and I promised myself to make evanescence out of permanence. People fall like it’s nothing, but I have been so used to traversing sideways, the person who never knew anything but the horizon. They thrown down ropes and they tease me with their swinging, but I could never leave the ground. And now they’re breaking barriers and now they’re visiting the moon and now I am addicted to loathing my fears. They’re pulling me like crisp leaves, painting metaphors of a sort of autumn in my mind. I wanted to look up so badly but my eyes seek the ground. Oh how I hate the voices in my head. The world watches me with frozen heartbeats and I let go of my last breath and I let go of the ropes and I became the dancing dreamer that never woke up.

January

January was never the beginning; it was always the end. January collapsed innocence; it exposed secrets. January did not sink like a stone; it did not float like a flower. January thundered in storm-clad and naked-bare; it thought it ran like clouds despite its rainless catastrophe. January was a liar; it promised resolutions and well-held wishes. January, instead, was boring; it lacked drama and interest and intrigue. January exhausted me; it killed me. January was wrought with misinterpretation and falsified vulnerability; it pulled up memories of forgotten winter. January ran away in its cowardice; it chased the sun from the sky and ruined my well cut lawn; it ravaged the streets and shook the gangs from the alleys. January was the reason I had to take down my Christmas lights; it turned our hearts cold and said monotonously, “Happy New Year.”

Plight

Years fold over, in pieces and torn sheets, crumpling under the weight of everything that came before. And this is how the world breathes history. Getting old feels like a fever, succumbing to heaviness and decay. Intrepidity seems centuries away, lost in a foreign land, in a distant mythology. To stray is striken down as cowardice, as if the path was always clear, breaking power cables from the shine of the undiluted neon. But maps are only given to those who already know where they’re going, not to hitchhikers who are trying to find home, not just the way to get there. And so, we ask everyone who they are and what they want and where they came from, hoping to bleed the same DNA, hoping to match someone, anyone. I think it’s easy to sneer and scoff at this unfettered assail, but don’t you hear the desperation in our voices? Because even if our larynxes don’t sound so pretty, don’t echo quite pleasant, at lease they have a sound. But what use is a voice if no one pays attention? Whoever came up with the idea of a tree falling in a forest with no one around must have been surrounded by people that never listened. It may be sadder to think that way, but I’m sad enough to think that way. On the highway alone, each step plays the teeter-totter of getting and not quite getting there. Your left foot revives your resolves while your right shrinks your aspirations right back down. You are supposed to be getting wiser as you get older, but the pages have been glued together, wrenched and nailed shut, ripped into silence. So when the tiny sapling falls, the redwood forest doesn’t bend down low enough to notice. The roots disperse away, because quite frankly, no one was paying attention at all.

Difference

Something lies, something lies in between the accents of what if and almost, almost as if there wasn’t such thing as perfection. But if that was true, then reality was a bit more distant than I could allow it to be. It didn’t hint of glamour or gloss. Rather, everything was just matte, everything just fell flat. If I could, I would, you know that I would. But to be is to try; let me dare to prove Yoda wrong, because when you’re different, you don’t have to worry about perfection. How can they quantify the optimal when there’s just a sample size of one? To be unique is to not worry about the competition. So no, I don’t think Yoda thought about that at all. To play the game of effortlessness took too much effort to even bother. You had to be careful to avoid being careless when you’re out to prove that you couldn’t care less. It was always easy to find the spectacular in the now — they shone fantasy on the mundane backdrop of reality. Talent always was supposed to trump dedication, or so they told me. In actuality, talent rotted, rude and bitter, in the lines of what if and almost, too stuck in the imaginary to recognize that potential energy was always theoretical and never counted, not really, not where it matters. Someone needs to pull back the curtains, rip the bandage that praised valor over value. Perfection is only found in the consistency it takes to whittle away wood, to refine marble, to turn another page. Let the heroes take the stage — they’re always in danger of falling off the edge anyway.

Monochromatic Problematic

I know that blue bleeds all over your artwork because I have nightmares of your favorite memory. But how do you remember the right hue of the ocean water when you lean into her lips? I know you notice the red that bleeds all over mine, but you never asked why. Would you believe I never noticed the blood that drenched us when you slit my throat? I was too focused on you to be anything but blind. Damn, I’m intoxicated off these infusions. I’ve drunk imagination and memories to the point where I slur purple when they ask me my favorite color. I only thought in black and white before I met you; your presence became the full spectrum ablaze in fireworks. Tell me — how far away is she from me in your mind? Let me know if you ever blur us in your dreams; do I ever confuse you into colorblindness? I know you’re known for selective coloring, and the Devil’s black has darkened your aura. At times, you made me the Aurora, but I’m becoming quantum since your distance (our pigments should never be this far apart). She’s the universe, she’s becoming all you can see; my shade is getting so hard to paint, dust is all I’ll ever be.

Aging

Regret is the injury of nostalgia, as we reclaim our identities by the passing years, and forget where we came from, and what we used to believe in. Our current passions override the old, and it’s easy to disregard the desires of your previous versions. Age threatens to erase our ghosts into invisibility. How easy do we make it to forget everything? I have learned to forgive myself for the things I have done, if only to recognize that in that moment, it was what I truly truly wanted. Or else, it was the only option I could take. Experience has made me weary, and my bones threaten to break as they shake, while I wait for wisdom to take over me. But wisdom doesn’t take on the mirage of age, but rather envelopes itself in the pull of children’s thoughts. I thought my refinement made me better, as I put more footprints on the earth. Yet, true evocation found me when I was barely passed five, and still too worldly to be fearful of the dark. The mirror stage is what we yearn for in all of our endeavors; we ache to return through our hallucinations, through our art, through our spirituality, to the unity between us and the ground we touch. We have learned the hierarchy of the body, and nothing has been quite the same since then. And in that order, our memories rule in forthright, and so we return to the viciousity that lives in spinning in circles. Time elapses and relapses, but in the end, it’s my bones who collapse.

 

Repetition

Anxiety gets thrown out reckless, proven in social science to be nothing but a lie. Yet, I find myself jittery on every level, all my electrons are spinning in the wrong direction. This is what I have become from you. I walked down every street, giving away walkie talkies to anyone with eyes and a heartbeat, leaving with promises of quick calls. They all said they would let me know if they saw you. My stresses turn to paranoia, and I’ve have taken to wrapping gauze on the folds of my eyelids. When I was warned that it would keep me from seeing the sunset, I, instead, mummified every path in my way. To keep you at a distance, I have learned to remove myself from the crowds. I only leave the safety of my bedroom when someone calls me and lets me know you walked by. I can only live in the places you just visited — being your shadow keeps you from being mine. I try not to reek of double exposure, but I can’t help but notice that my passport has been stamped at all our memories, as you take her where you took me. I never found you to be original, in the way artists are original — not at all, but at least, not pretending to — but this, this threw me over the lines of sanity. I swam towards moving on, and got lost at how; I missed the exit of get over it, and kept returning to the dead end that didn’t even announce itself as that. Instead, it just said, happily ever after: this way here.

Salvagery

You are my adversity; you are everywhere, all the time. You are my disaster. You have brought me to life. You lit fireworks in my heart, and I am still burning. I am still in the sky, and it is so far from you. I did not believe in love at first sight, but maybe now I do. Maybe I just didn’t believe in living, because I was asleep before I met you. You became an addiction, and I was a user that was just pulled closer. It wasn’t happy, it was everything. It was anger, and sadness, and faith, and despair, and depression, and joy, and frustration. It was love, wasn’t it? With you, I am on that high. I am alive with you. Without you, everything is less. No wonder I became addicted. You were hero of my heroin. I put myself in rehab, but the system is corrupt, and we ran to each other over and over again. I ruined my world when you weren’t there to illuminate it. I am trying to be better now, but you make it so hard for anything to be neutral. I need to make my own fireworks, you can’t always be the fuel to set me ablaze. But I have learned so much from you. I am a better person because of you. The world is more vivid and worth living in. I will make my peace with your existence; I just don’t know if you still will be there in that balancing act.

Timezones

Time never feels as much of an illusion as when you’re roaring away on an airplane, racing the sunset to your destination. You get lost in your own cyclic metronome, finding exhaustion has nothing to do with when the shopkeepers turn over the signs and lock the doors. Sometimes, I wondered, if you went fast enough, maybe you could beat your own mistakes. Your younger selves will look into these weary eyes and make promises to never end up like how you are now. Lids that cannot keep open, a head that won’t stop throbbing — how unfortunate it is that we sleep at all. I have been meaning to go to a sleep clinic, if only to rid myself of the nightmares that wake everyone up in the early mornings. But my resolve wavers in the very real worry, that if I lose these nightmares, I will lose you entirely. Their phone number is written in smeared pen marks on the back of my hand, but every time I shower, I make sure to rub it all off. While drying in my towel shaped hair and body, I scribble it back on again. These trips are making me too bold. I am starting to feel as if I have all the time in the world to change.