The Wrong Time, The Wrong Place

i got my dates

all damn wrong

but i went and

played along

for i was so

deluded by you

guess i lost

track of what

was still true

i wanted to

impress, but i

ended at a skid

just who the fuck

am i kidding—?

i’m so stupid.

Sh*t Happens

Clocks on the wall, talk to watches on the wrist
It’s the moments we relive, it’s the moments like this
When it’s time to get ill, we be so ahead of time
It’s the moments we achieve, best believe it’s the moments…

~*~

Choking on shoelaces, eating your own name

Slathered amounts of a faked reversible fame

Eyelids heavy with mascara and lack of sleep

The unruly dreams that weren’t yours to keep

.

Unkempt hair and façade of flowery smiles

Profound Neverland poets in mapped-out styles

Mystical themes and a darker spark to excel

And the gibberish words you throw down the well

.

The cruel irony of it all, of the empty room mess

Until we’re all borrowed and we’re all obsessed

Imageries of sedation to escape every inclination

Treading on hallowed ground and imagined freedom

.

Ethereal tongues cut off the heavenly songs they sung

Adventures and threat, palms chafing on ladder rungs

The lethal dagger of time nears sinews of thin throats

Inconvenient demise popping eccentric egos so bloat

.

The world is a weight, sinking with excessive wait

Recesses of marianas abyss, the hope coming late

Dusty pills, rusty medicines, oiled bones set to grind

Melding thought balloons, chronic timelines of a mind

.

Assuming you’re just a coward, refusing to see this reality’s exuberance

Reasoning your existence is but a tangled storm, relying on your defiance

But don’t wait for the starving zeppelin future to just eat away your name

This is life and shit happens, so wreck your own misery and don’t pass the blame.

eleven:eleven

make a wish

a fated kiss

four eleven

listen heaven

make a wish

whimsy bliss

again eleven

chime broken

make a wish

hopeful hiss

strike eleven

now and then

make a wish

never to miss

eleven eleven

faith stars even.

send in the sparks

solace of the sun

saturated in hues

songs of disaster

scents sensuous

sands of the time

spiralling spastic

salvation of soul

stars synonymous.

Aeon +1

glass eyed

with a dulled reverie

waiting for

seconds of eternity

to pass by

and lose their bend

but time, it

just seems to extend.

Impatience

Waiting is

So irritating,

Maddening,

Excruciating,

Boring, and

Time-consuming.

And in the end,

What do you get?

Much ado about

Fucking nothing.

Bored as a Consulting Detective

When my ennui reaches that point

Where slamming my head on a wall,

Chewing at my nails until I strike bone,

Pacing about like my limbs are on fire,

Ransacking my bookshelf to arrange it,

And tearing all my hairs out to shreds

As I proceed to count them, one by one

All seems like ideal enjoyable hobbies

To tentatively preoccupy my wasted time.

(P.S. And yes, shooting at the wall as well.)

Stargirl and the Rocket Lights

You are a curiosity, or a mental case, as some called it rather crudely and dismissively, and you knew everyone noticed. But they didn’t care, and neither should you. One day, you impulsively proclaimed, whilst balancing on the top of a redwood tree branch, that disappearing acts never got old, so you said goodbye to your squirrel friend, clambered down the tree hurriedly, and dashed home. You burst into your room with a loud door slam, gathered up your paraphernalia, grabbed your half-full rucksack dotted with strange pins and souvenir keychains, which was patiently waiting by your ramshackle oakwood cabinet, and began haphazardly shoving various motley things inside. Once you were finished cleaning up and made even more of a mess in the process, you quickly plastered a teddy bear print band-aid on your cheek from where the rough wood accidentally scratched and left a thin red mark, clumsily tied your DIY pinstriped Keds’ purple and green shoelaces, stretched out—as if competing in a marathon—on an abandoned Twister board on your carpeted floor, and finally you left the house, chasing your dissolution without so much as a backward glance. The first part was easy. The next part was easier.

The nightwalking horizon was tinted virtually the same colour as your ripped stonewashed denim overalls, the reticulated stars were in implausible full burst and clearly visible, a myriad riot like the splattered black inkstains on your bohemian tie-dyed shirt, and the moon was shaded exactly and uncannily like your ivory silk flower leggings, the number of the craters perfectly aligned with the number of the frayed holes by your knees, the ones you tore yourself with zigzag safety scissors. The dreamy air tasted faintly like bubblegum ice cream, and the astral bodies were softly clicking into their designated places, a marvellous tableaux of God’s fanciful ethereal jigsaw puzzle. Nothing more was to be prepared; all you had to do was pass against the serendipitous turn of time. That particular task in itself was no difficult feat for your whimsical affinity. The other factor to consider was your destination. Invariably, it didn’t matter which bus you got on, if you were even waiting for a bus at all, for you have an overpowering ominous sensation within your heart that you’ll always inevitably end up on a wayward road, diverging on the intersection to nowhere. And in your own quote unquote words, as that one cliché that nobody says goes, signal for the universe and the galaxy will come.

Your vintage analogue Hello Kitty clock ticked sluggishly second by second, and the small candy floss pink lights by the side came to life and began to glow fervently as the hands struck exactly 8 PM. You had a lot of time to spend thereon and then, sitting prim and taciturn on the graffitied wooden bench, waiting for the longest forever. You intertwined scarlet camellias on your plaited geranium hair and held it in place with a gargantuan leopard-print scrunchie. You tapped your hands, plucked a few sweet and sour notes on your marmalade-orange ukulele, and hummed a Joy Division song melodically, and you laughed quietly when you flubbed the chorus with a splintered squeak. You counted the cheap glittery stars you stuck on your plastic journal even though you knew the number by heart, some microscopic yellow speckles transferring to your skin as you absentmindedly peeled one at the side with a polkadotted fingernail. You scribbled lines of guitar keys, and doodled literal intricate keys without paired locks, onto the slightly-torn cover page with a blueblooded space pen, and used the same pen to trace the wiry butterfly outline on your right ankle. You observed with childish wonder and twinkling heterochromatic dandelion eyes as prams, automobiles, taxis, and tallyho’s passed by you in an amicable whirlwind breeze and friendly engine revving. There were a billion tangible stars in this side of the dimension, just a little more than the glamorous stars shining on your notebook, and you can pluck each and every single one off their orbit. You had a lot of fun little preoccupations, and the time on your hands seemed almost eternal.

Time was up. When it seemed like the aberrant clocks hitched their breaths and you’ve done a thousand and one tasks to fill such a lacuna, finally, Hello Kitty’s spinning hour hand gingerly moved into its designated place. The moment it touched the notch and exactly as the pink lights began their little show, you tilted your chin until it was higher than your freckled button nose, and stared enthusiastically at the empty tranquil sky. As if on cue, your implausible carpool vehicle hurtled imperceptibly from beneath the atmosphere, burning the crepuscular firmament’s concrete shadows at light-year speed, and arrived with a dissuaded thump, to take you away from such a bland and diluted planet. Tucking a stray highlighted neon hair back in your pierced and heavily-ornamented ears, you cautiously replaced the overflowing tatterdemalion notebook back in your bag, bounced on your heels and stood up with lilting sneakered toes, and ceremoniously stepped into that rocketship invention calmly, without any nuance of surprise or astonishment. It seemed you would simply walk straight and be swallowed whole by the blinding flash, but at the last moment, you turned back at the dominating darkness and sent a quaint, fragile, almost palpable air-kiss flying from your painted ruby lips and painted dainty fingers onto the open space. The entire population of the world must have felt a faint zephyr graze their cheek softly at that very moment, but they were too naïve to even bother with noticing it. Yet you said your polite goodbyes, so it didn’t matter. You grandiosely waved a final farewell, the tattooed patterns on your arms spinning and dancing with pastel motion, and you smiled lazily, quite cryptically, as the metallic-gold doors closed in dénouement with a sibilant hiss and a burst of flourishing steam. The metaphysical vessel roared as it propelled into ignition again, shooting up into the sky immediately and billowing into evanescence out of peripheral view, and you were gone with it. Your wish was granted, and you permanently left behind the life you always tolerated with distaste, into a more interesting place with a better yesterday, and no one cared…except for one.

Stargirl, when you ran away and stole the cornflower moon with you from the midnight sky to elope, did you think no one would be interested? When you vanished and charmingly serenaded the sun into a retrograde motion, did you think no one would find out? Did you ever think, for a single heartbeat, that when your star, hiding in plan sight among millions of the other specks in the star-freckled sky, was quietly extinguished, I wouldn’t even notice?

I out of all people would hate to admit such a fact, but for once in your extraordinary yet ephemeral existence, Stargirl, you were wrong.

Cinderella Stars

You’re busy drawing hearts
You run your fingers down the glass
An open mirror
Now you’re sleeping in the front seat
Like a crushed leaf on the concrete night—
Tonight the center of the sun will separate in sparks
They’re climbing up the sky and down the dark…

~*~

Just let the sky fall one more time

Kiss my Cinderella stars goodnight for me

It’s a stubborn weather, but baby it doesn’t matter

There’s a rule in my tongue and a reverie

We never chased—we collided angrily

All that vitriol, it hurts under the skin to see

You were always late for the crystalline ball

The stiletto shards lodged in the eventide hall

But we’ll play dress up with crowns and monarchy

The night is sempiternal, never ending at twelve

Hold your fairy close, pumpkin, don’t be sorry

This is only a tale mended by rats and elves

Maybe the clock will rewind back to the 70’s

Under moonlight, you’ve never looked so sublime

So kiss my Cinderella stars goodbye for me

And let the sky fall one more time.

~*~

Now we broke another bracelet
Tore it off your wrist tonight
And now that Cinderella’s gone
She swallowed up the sun
A middle-class explosion would be nice
If we’re the dynamite…

Vanishing Point; All That’s Left Are Traces Of You

And without you is how I disappear
And live my life alone forever now
Can you hear me cry out to you
Words I thought I’d choke on
Figure out I’m really not so with
You anymore, I’m just a ghost
So I can’t hurt you anymore…

~This Is How I Disappear; My Chemical Romance

~*~

If you found me gone one day, with nothing but a whirlwind of scattered letters and notebooks and papers, with one parched fountain pen dying of dehydration in the middle, lying forgotten in my dislimned room like an ironic tableau, to indicate the figure, the mass, the emptied space which my once-corporeal missing body once occupied, what would you do?

Would you silently shut the door, lock the house, and leave, leave that damned place that swallowed me whole, and start afresh, burying all memories and preludes of mine, allowing it to be covered in dust and cobwebs along with the crumbling papers, in that lonely dark room in a restless abandoned house, doomed to become another cheap haunted tourist attraction—?

Or would you take a deep breath, gathering all your aplomb and composure in a single oxygen intake, preparing yourself for the worst yet still hoping for the best, grip the knob with sweaty quivering palms, open the door with a prominent creak, and step in cautiously, allowing the darkness of the shadows and the lingering ghosts of what once was to chill your bones and embrace your every being—?

And if you were to choose the latter, if you were to gather all the papers, crumpled, clean, torn-up, every scrap and bit scribbled upon in a fit of either ennui or frustration, and put them together, as if they were the puzzle pieces that will finally solve the complexities and mysteries of my shambled life, and you read them, word for word, letter for letter, line for line and rhyme for rhyme, the mindlessly scratched punctuation and intentionally scratched out words blurring into a singular monstrous emotion that discreetly ravaged and poisoned your child’s system internally, now reforming and threatening to tear at your soul’s throat, as you read the unorganised pastiche of all my regrets, passions, agonies, jubilances, those things that I wanted to say, those things I never said, and those things that I will never get to say, what would you do?

Would you tie those anthologies of pain and paradise altogether in a messy little bundle, and without so much as an apology nor prayer, simply toss them gracelessly into the raging hungry fireplace, letting each scrap of paper curl up like dying butterfly wings and be devoured by the rising flames, starving for memories to destroy, turning my thoughts into bitter ashes, no longer to be sifted and repaired, rather only left to the whim of the wind, to get caught in people’s eyes, leaving my life to be an open case, speculated and falsified upon, leaving the words of the dead to remain dead and only an unspoken echo, a pale blot in the fabric of time—?

Or would you tie those florilegiums of hurt and happiness altogether in a neat little bundle, and with utterances of faith and assurance, share them eloquently with the others wanting in hope, letting each page be turned with eager fingers like flourishing petals of blue forget-me-nots and be devoured by the willing masses, voracious for memories to engrave, turning my ponderings into a spectrum of colours, no longer to be ignored and rotting away in a locked grey vault, rather to be left in the whim of the breeze, to get caught in people’s hearts, leaving my life to be stipulated and validated upon, making the words of the dead come back to life and to gain a voice of their own, a universe itself in the tapestry of time—?

And if you opted for the second decision, and you succeeded, what would you do if you returned to my room one day, and found me, sitting casually on my bed, with an overflowing ink jar dripping murky tears on my desk and a flurry of blank sheets of paper like a hurricane of unconceived literature on the spotless carpet, taciturn as I write out brand new compositions with a faint yet genuine smile on my solid scarlet lips, content with my slowly unfading existence, colliding shades of carnation and pastel tints efflorescing on my pallid cheeks and everywhere else that the bleeding colours chances to touch, revived by your efforts, revived by the memory of my name fresh in everyone’s sentience, unaged and youthful, looking as if I never left, this place, this world, and a void in your mind, in the very first place?

Would you tell yourself that all this, was simply nothing but a tired delusional dream of yours, disintegrating into the aether as soon as you make contact with it—?

Or would you dare step in again, completing a full möbius strip of the vanishing cycle, into my bright phantasmic room, and touch my skin to see if the bubble pops…?