the rain won't touch you

it is tender,

the traces of you that live in

the sheets, the door knobs, 

the curve of my neck and

the sprinkle of sugar spilt

on the kitchen top

as you rushed to make a brew

because you have no time to waste

in your clockwork life.

some days i will find traces of you,

in the dent of our couch,

when all is still,

and you are in the moment, 

with me,

caressing each second with 

pure, aching gentleness.

on days when the sky is

a tad bit too grey, my heart will sink

with your mood,

and i find myself framing the small part of a world

unfair to you on the corner walls

where the sun won’t ever touch upon.

you live in the soft of my mind,

where the glitches of my most haunting thoughts

are kept at bay

for the shine of your being.

the wonder of eternity’s rise and fall

is how easy it is to dismiss the

pessimism of a lover’s curse that everybody 

fears so much,

they fuel its presence.

but i, i dismiss it wholly every time i wake up to you,

smiling in its everlasting familiarity;

i dismiss it in the way my toes still tingle when our fingers touch,

when i still pluck out the stars that have collided in our love from the skies

for you.

they are milestones of an eternal love,

glowing from every intangible emotions we experience,

together, every film ending we criticise, 

every cookie crumble on our bedsheets

and every state of being we will ever feel.

i travelled the landscape of you

and found the site of flamboyant, frayed flags on bent poles

of those who had conquered,

so i sit in the chaos of what was once,

and hold in my hand the gentle breeze of a white flag

not to conquer you,

but to surrender to the colossal beauty

of all that is you

and all that is love.

you live in the soft of my mind

as i do yours,

and we unravel in unison,

becoming beautifully, succulently

and joyously

comfortable.

to a rock; you are diamond.

you used to be my hero.

maybe you still are,

when the days are violet and

i laugh at the way you used to dance

around the living room to Estrellida

and talk to the fishes; when the tears i drop

are not for you.

that is when you are still my hero.

it is appalling,

the way i have stopped

plucking out your grey hairs,

instead i cannot bear to look at them.

the way i have stopped getting your crude jokes

because the crude words have

sunken in and etched themselves

onto my skin when i was many times

their victim on the days your eyes are

black as coal and earth-less.

i remember embracing the tuck of your frown

and humming to your rants like they

are things to love,

and maybe then, my love was truest

because you didn’t need to be happy

and fit in my wants for me to love you this much.

my heart sags at a certain angle

for the stones of your heavy regrets

i inherit, yet these are not the kind of stones

we can surgically remove

or throw down a hill, because these are

the stepping stones i have acquired

in growing to understand the woman

who used to brave the world for me

and now sits in the dent of her pains

hoping for the world to ask her forgiveness.

you used to be my hero

and i feel like i am betraying you,

each day as they pass

when you make plans for a summer

you and i will not share,

but you make these plans anyway because deep down

you know they will never happen

yet you do it because it moves me

and gives you more to lose

when i too, become the tales of your suffering 

you will tell your sisters on the way to dinner.

today he said the way i licked my teeth after the meal

reminded him of you

and i was angry for the negative tone

but was i angry

because it was negative,

or because i didn’t want to be like you anymore?

i once wrote about my biggest inspiration,

and it was you,

because i loved every inch of you

and woke up to your words like gospel.

you will forever, still be the hero,

the inspiration. for you are

everything i loved

but everything i never want to be,

because growing into you has never looked so heartbreaking.

through the walls

it is a new kind of sadness

i carry with me,

like the overused plastic bags that have seen 

enough runs to the shops i so adamantly try to keep;

it is not heavyweight or bulky

but crunched up and sharp, slowly expanding with 

the weight i stretch it into each day.

it is a new kind of sadness

that finds me in bed, wide-eyed and struggling

with cold toes and incorrigible energies

sifting into the spaces of my centre,

catching me off guard.

it finds me calculating the meaning of happiness,

wondering where the equation went wrong in her mind,

where calculations are plenty but with illogical 

relative solutions.

it finds me listening through the cold plaster walls

to hear her yawn and remember

every distinct note and effort it takes

to be as tired as she is now.

it is a new kind of sadness

that finds me praying into the night sky,

for peace to fill her soul in a world too big for her

where some things cannot be possible.

it is the sadness that my tears can 

never truly explain and words become meaningless 

at the presence of knowing

a mother’s soul at peace

is hard to achieve as long as she is alive

and breathing into her cup of sorrows 

in the late of the night, clutching onto a demise 

that no chinese films or homemade meals

can distract her from.

i seek some rest 

in the soft of his shoulders,

in the reassurance of their words,

in the utmost reality where i am taught

to reach my happiness,

but there are too many hours in a day i have spent

thinking of her happiness

until it is mine,

therefore her sadness,

becomes mine,

but i do not have the strength to 

hold her life as mine to bear.

it is a new kind of sadness

i bring into a room full of comfort

in the walls with a sturdy door confining my tears within them;

a purple couch with a purple cushion i hold onto for dear life,

and a man who tells me

the sadness is not something i can

leave behind every Thursday afternoons, 

but it is something i make a part of me

and come to terms with.

to let go is to understand.

it is a new kind of sadness

that finds me understanding

the lack of shine in her forever eyes,

the sighs she lets out when she wakes

because her wishes for an endless sleep remain unanswered.

i understand the look she gives as she loses herself 

to the thoughts that live in shadows and comes out 

in the turn of the evening

because i too, have gone to that place

many, many times.

to let go of this,

is to let go of her heavy, heavy pain.

her day.

today, i miss you

not for your significance worth celebrating

but the outcome of today filled with

insignificance,

where you are hiding in the dark

and i cannot reach you.

i did not reach you,

and though there is a deliberate motif 

in this new reluctance,

i refuse to feel guilty anymore

for being too exhausted to try

because no guilt or regret

can make the dim light surrounding you

shine any brighter.

but it does not stop the sadness from washing in.

it is a reality i have to learn

to come to terms with;

this light that surrounds you

is not ours to hold 

for we have long been cast from it,

and no matter how brightly

it shines on certain days of the week,

you will always find a way to 

hide yourself within its shadows

but i cannot walk you into the dark of it any longer.

today, i miss you,

and it is a reality i have to learn

to face,

where we do not live in parallel spaces anymore

so i have to learn to appreciate you more

you in your past, your pained present and whoever you may become.

today, i miss you,

and this will be a new permanence,

but i will forever hold this eternal bond with you

on a mindful pedestal

for though you are slowly

becoming one with the dark,

i will shine my brightest light strong and glorious,

forever in your honor.

in eternal embrace

this dent is the result.

it is the effect from endless churning and

unmindful chaos in dark spaces of my choices.

it whispers to me the weight of the thoughts i aimed so 

carelessly towards a particular point 

in the core of my being,

now shaped to carry and sag;

it whispered so painfully i stopped

and finally listened.

the dent is the result of my self-betrayal

and urges me to push it 

outwards

and release.

release.

there are many ways

to conquer fearlessly,

and bring up a shield against

the waning days that loom over

and taunt; to conquer until their

contours eventually bow to your heavy demise

and let you flourish towards self-healing

in your own time.

courage is beautiful when it rests in the curve of your palm

and the shine of your eyes,

for the world will begin to grow under a brighter light.

i have learnt to understand the fine line

between the merge of everything and nothing,

to choose which side of the line

to ground myself.

i see the world in its entirety.

i caress the skin of each energy that surrounds me,

like a lover, like family, like a friend;

recognising the smooth marble textures of the dim and low that

makes me shiver, to the velvet warmth that glow and

fill me with gracious, all-encompassing joy.

i learn to be wakeful,

under the tired skies of a slumbering season,

embracing the patient, watchful steps i take

alongside time,

guarded at first, until i can find enough momentum

to hold its hand and run with it.

i believe in eternal life

and respect that i will not be able

to see the whole of it through my conscious being, 

in this skin i am wearing.

i let the rest remain a mystery

for the lives after mine to experience

what my innermost subconscious will carry on living

after my mind will have long

unlatched from my tangible state of being.

this is eternal,

but my body is not,

so i will nurture all i have

to grow to their full potential and learn to be wholesome;

to exist in the entirety of my life;

on the fine line between the merge of

everything and nothing

i choose to live with everything,

and exist amongst.

i kiss the light of love

thanking it for its presence

so constant,

in such ever-changing passages

and believe,

that there is a reason 

i have connected with threads i have learnt to tie eternal knots with,

the threads of life i have crossed over, entangled with, 

stretched on, laughed with, cried for,

felt intense emotions of both extremities towards…

what i own within my emotional depth,

is a gift,

so i cherish it dearly

and learn to use it to bring me light,

not shed darkness or

hurt to the subconscious path of my soul,

where all should be effervescent and 

passionately on fire.

for life should be effervescent and

passionately on fire.

always.

the bleakest of courage is still courage.

so i learn again, to not shed tears in front of the world

for the poorest part of my soul

because i should appreciate the sun

and watch it glow even though

it hurts my eyes, strain my neck and

burn the forefront of my thoughts that are striving to be seen

under the overpowering glare of the big star of hope.

the world is blind to what i have to offer

with my nothing and everything.

it is the beginning of something that i 

spend days hiding under the covers from,

and now i watch it open slowly,

then rapidly, growing,

like the earthquakes they never expected 

until next month.

the days settle like flour,

thick and tasteless, like the texture

of my mind, like the depths of my eyes when i catch my reflection.

i believe you mean the best

and nothing less, when you push me off the cliff of my emotions,

so i can learn to claw at the rocks, to want,

to live,

to survive the abyss you have caught me looking down at

over and over,

but i wasn’t ready for the push

when i had leaned backwards

into your support.

i dangle, at the edge of the world,

and i cannot say i am scared anymore

for i do not dare for anyone to listen anymore

because well, it’s just a fucking scary situation isn’t it?

so deal with it.

learn to be happy, in your own ways,

in your old ways,

in the ways that killed you and brought you back to life,

learn it, breathe it, live it, cherish it.

this happiness,

spoken of like a myth, like

a powerful spell, is here

under my grip,

but if i clench any tighter,

i will watch it erupt and disintegrate,

so i have to learn to hold on loosely

and adapt.

i wish you could understand that

behind my moulding, decaying walls that everybody claim is made of steel

i also protect this parcel of pain weighing me down on my other hand

for i cannot leave something that is made of glass

purely to gravity.

so i learn again to build the walls

and not say a word.

i sing silly songs to drown the discord of my heart breaking,

and despite the ache of knowing everybody would rather 

fix the fixable and

shy away from the one that truly need it,

i forgive them, and turn to silence too,

like them, 

for i understand why they’d rather listen to the easier answers

to their accidentally profound questions.

How are you?

i am ephemeral, impermanent, transcendental

and alive.

suddenly,

everybody are strangers

so i decide to connect with the

effervescence of the moon and step in its craters,

for the strangers point and gaze from all of the world, in togetherness,

with the knowledge that they will

never be able to touch it.

but you touched me.

you are my astronaut, my spaceman,

but maybe it is time you yearned to

take flight from this lonely orbit?

i can make things right,

but it is time and nothing else,

that is so precious to me,

but keeps being pulled away from under my stand when i 

find some balance again.

i freefall,

fast and wild,

into the gush of self-repairment,

because i have to,

for who?

because i have to,

for who?

because i have to,

for who?

for you?

for me?

for her?

for him?

when i just really want to, 

find time,

to want to,

for myself.

what is this world for

and what is my excuse for being alive?

what is yours?

and yours?

and yours?

all i ask for is time

but the world keeps turning

but they all keep turning

but you keep turning

around

and

away

around

and

away

around

and

away.

all i ask for is time,

in an impatient world.

i remember the beautiful days

when the sun kissed your hair

and lived in your eyes,

the way you looked at me.

i remember the beautiful days

when you promised me

all of what i now only

occasionally see,

when you rested your mind on the curve of my thigh.

i remember the beautiful days

when i listened to our heartbeats

come together under your skin

as i fell asleep on your chest,

bare, just for me.

i remember the beautiful days

when i could shed my skin and bones

and still feel like the queen of your heart.

i remember it all,

and want so much for you to find the trust you

and the world have lost in me,

because my excuse to be alive,

is that things that are broken

can always find pieces that fit.

alone with a blanket

nights like these,
thick and deserted, live eyes that are
wide, manic, desperate, 
with hands in the pupils, clawing out for a salvation that is
sorely out of sight.

nights like these, 
cold and disgraceful, live lips now parched,
lined with dried blood. nights like
these,
where skin off my face reside
dead beneath my frantically bitten nails.

nights like these,
impulsive and raw, lives I,
who lie on floors to etch closer to gravity’s
pull, yearning, pleading for its grasp, 
to plunge me down through these
layers and layers of life,
of cement, of plaster, until i hit the ground
and shatter,
along with the wreckage i caused along the way,
until i feel nothing.
nothing.

nothing.

then nothing can shake me.

it is nights like these,
sad and heavy,
when even the moon cannot shed light
on a soul like mine,
blackened with fear,
contaminated with madness.

the curtains are closed.

i am mad, i think? i think i am mad.

nights like these,
when i contemplate on the unforgivable,
and wonder if that son of a bitch
really wasn’t a son of a bitch,
and if i were in his skin, behind his eyes, inside his head,
i would’ve abused me, too,

yes. 
i would hit myself, too, i would kick myself, too,
i would spit at myself, too,
i would throw myself to the floor and knee myself in places that cannot heal, too
because aren’t i just one colossal show reel of the best nightmares?

and who’d want nightmares
when they can choose between good dreams or sleeping pills or drugs or death or anything else that 
stops you
from having nightmares?

nights like these,
deaf and blind,
when it becomes clear to me
that the happiness i seek
is always inside me,
but i have just chosen to look the other way and

blame the world for what i am doing to myself.

blindspot.

these times are hard.

i lose grip of my thoughts

shaking in viral, contagious despair

in a locked room where white walls and crumpled clothes leer at me

because i have so much more to prove, yet there i stay

in the mockery, in the humiliation until i can

find a sane expression to sew onto my face

for i cannot afford to shed anymore tears

in a world full of rain.

i am the tension of guitar strings,

the sharp edge of broken glass.

i bite back works so carefully strung

until i unravel and say the words i meant to keep in the middle, unheard, unnoticed.

these times are hard,

and the days grow old and increasingly intense.

my conscience could be clear,

but can anybody really live with such transparency?

it is dark, where my mind lingers,

and i fear that i have grown weaker 

in the ability to find the light that is pitifully

flickering out from the centre of me.

i have so much yearn for happiness,

so much yearn that it aches, that it cuts me in places even you, my love,

cannot reach.

i have so much yearn

for the person i used to greet in the mirror,

for the person you fell in love with,

for the person that carried a different voice,

a different spirit, a different skin,

for the person i was proud to be, for just a while.

now i only try, and keep trying, and keep trying so hard 

- at what?

i disappear into a box

when i hate everything about myself and

i hate everything about the pain i feel

and i hate everything about the tears i shed and how i look and how i sound and how i think and fucking breathe.

in this box lives my passion, my sorrows, and my strengths. 

it is here where i am most free, because i don’t need to prove any fucking thing

to any fucking one.

these are hard times.

there was another hard time when i was

fragile to their eyes,

kept in a box of my mother’s regrets,

dangling in the forefront of my father’s worries,

clawing out from within the ache of my sister’s

long buried pain.

now i am fragile and fraying

to my own eyes,

and i feel it.

it throttles me, hard and strong like the waves of an angry

vengeful ocean,

my denial runs dry like cold earth, 

my strengths - or faux-strengths -beaten down,

reminding me that there is somebody

inside

that craves the attention of a better world.

“these are dark days, Jarrod”

i say to an old friend who had played witness to

once upon a time,

when a poor attempt of a man painted sadness into my eyes

and froze it in place.

now the thawing begins, and oh,

it hurts.

i wonder when i last shrugged at the world,

scorned at the disasters it served me on a platter, and cannot remember

when i had last gambled my guilt for freedom,

because it is hard to gamble your guilt when you hurt

the ones you love in this process of self-centring. 

so i choose to stop centring myself,

putting myself off like the least likeable chore of the day,

a with this begins the disintegration of my entire being.

the night grew,

expanding and showing me a glimpse of infinity.

i am scared, my love.

i fear for the skies,

i fear for the earth,

i fear for the hours i am losing in the

bundle of my teardrops and the pull of my thoughts,

so wretched

so testing.

i am scared of forgetting what it is like to live.

but i cannot burden anybody with these fears of mine

except a man on a couch who tries to look into my soul,

or whatever is left of it.

i am scared, my love.

i am sad like the hole in our wall,

grey like the city we roam,

too heavy to move,

too stubborn to let go yet

too fragile to fix but

too eager to merely fade away -

so i drift.

oh, it hurts,

to hold so much pain, to handle so much energies that is beyond this body cradling me.

oh, it hurts,

to search for the happiness i know so well.

come forth, from the dark.

i watch the line of collected dust

dance to Sigur Ros, shy

in the corner of my walls,

and i weep for the subtle grace of the world

that are left unnoticed and swept away.

my tears fall for all the saints and

deities who cannot help her,

for the truths that lie at her feet

like candy wrappers.

my tears fall for the many miles

that fail to take her pain away to spread

across the wind.

our words have run dry,

peeling off like cheap wallpaper

in the den of her mind.

i see her blurred figure,

from 5 years ago shaking me,

holding onto a child she is losing

and i wonder if she was as angry as she was

because she saw herself reflected in my eyes.

my tears fall for the world she orbits around,

for its colourless fields of horrors she doesn't

deserve to trust.

the candles have gone out,

the winds are high,

but i will leave the door open

to the dangers of the world beyond 

where she has lost her way,

and hope with all the tears i have gathered,

that she will come in

with full embrace,

because here is where her mind is safe.

here is where we are all safe.

nails bitten black iii

Part III: acceptance of all that is.

my mind is a fossil, preserved and frail with the weight of the world soiling it to the depths of its buried, tired self. i am sometimes hollow like a shell abandoned, sometimes full like the entire existence of motion, sight, sound, smell, touch infiltrating every inch of everything we see and encompass around our lives. full of wonders, of hopes, of failures, of dreams, of questions, on wonders, on hopes, on failures, on dreams, on questionable existence of time and how it offers its own two hands to the entire movement of a galaxy. the idea of 'now' is a relative term, contemporary like its passing definition. it is hard to avidly keep your eyes directed forward, when we are racing through a mental track of an ever-changing constant. everything we cling to will move back within the trail of our lives and we will have no time to construct what we bring to a future, by focusing so much on a present that is settling to the past. i find myself breathless and panting like an old dog. time goes away, to an unknown destination. i believe there lives a portal under our pillows and in the skyline where day meets night; it takes and takes and takes until there is nothing left for us to offer. and then we disintegrate slowly, from outside in, until our souls have no more homes to crawl back to.

then we are timelessly free, like sand in crosswind.

the walls speak to me like they understand me. i shivered in the velvet blue of the night and my toes tingled. i admired the art of dying and how I went about piecing it together; the 4/4 heartbeat dissonant to chaos on my mind, pink echoes of parquet flooring beneath the stretch of my body, drawn curtains over an open window where I dangled my feet five storeys above ground level many a times with my back to mirrors that glared down on me. I can still remember the smell of an overheating computer, of iron and the colour of wine. it is here, where i stopped to stare into another world, numb and completely accepting. It is the mindset of somebody sitting on death's worn and bent couch but somehow i have carried it with life because i took it back. but unlike the chinese childhood legends i grew up so eagerly on, i did not meet the blind woman, i did not drink the soup. i did not forget the past when i was reborn. i was, instead, spared this naivety by learning to embrace that mortality was as solid as the wall i stare at for long intervals on days when i am dazed and separate to my body. 

what can i say? i adapt.

i have learnt to befriend pain, to learn its secrets and understand its cries. it has a stench like bleach but with a similar effect, it destroys and cleanses. it gives you the outcome you appreciate in the long run when your shoes have gone and your feet embrace soil. i have learnt to show it the way. i stop hanging my faces on the wall and wear them down until they no longer become disguises. this is a new age i have aspired to, when i can accept that things breach comfort and fall, teaching us to find salvation within ourselves.

the handmade blanket of colours drapes down my thighs to my feet. the cup of tea by my side is now freezing cold, numb like my mind as i look at what i believe is a synopsis of myself. i wonder where i can fix the loopholes, the gaping hollows of where i was once decapitated and carelessly sewn back on by hands that wanted to try too hard. i am a happy person, deep inside, in the core of layers and layers of selfish complications i bestowed upon myself. like a pulley, like a slingshot, the weight i carry tugs with determination the further i go, and it is the relief i get when i am lifted and let go to plummet down towards the core of my euphoria.

i listen to the sounds i hear when all is silent, for it is in silence, where secrets are loudest. sometimes, i listen for the songs of the cicadas by the olive trees of my grandparent's garden, and i hear them, distant and sad, ephemeral like the ever-churning concept of reality. i listen for the wind that catches between the wheels of my bicycle in a cool Manchester night. i listen for the dial tone to end and the first, minute, tired sigh of my mother's before she greets me with the romantic happiness i am grateful for. i listen for familiarity personal to me.

what is the permanence of this, other than life and death? everything else is subjective, personal, confusing - like passion, like fear. i try my most to stop anticipating, and embrace everything with the strongest passion i can conjure within myself. i will attempt even more so, to laugh at fear, for it brings nothing but the things i least wish to cross paths with, praying for the best and only the best, sometimes convincing myself that i don't deserve any less. i stare at the ceiling and crawl out from under my skin, dancing with air, fading with smoke. what is the permanence of this?

how many surfaces, i wonder, have i touched; a lamp post, the seat of a train, the condiments that make everyday things, that were once touched and loved by those now deceased in a forever slumber? how many moments have slipped past my consciousness, i wonder, when i was stood next to somebody i will never meet, who learnt my name and read my thoughts, maybe even touched my shoulder. it is an ethereal feeling of being able to connect with another dimension, another realm of living. it is almost like how i'd imagine to experience sitting cross-legged and casually hunched in the middle of a hurricane, when all that are destroyed are now a whirring, low hum of blur surrounding your small, solid levitational state of sacred sanctuary. i think i have touched upon the transcendental stems of my mind, and i will one day exert it to the surface and let it become.

i believe in the spirits, in the unseen forces, in the parallel universe, in the strange glitches we get out the corner of our eye when imagination runs too deep into the wild. 

i don't believe such transcendence like this can be a lie.

nightfall. the stars they call to me, so i respond. i am insensitive to the callouses of the world. tonight, i am at peace.