Tree house.

(impromptu) (bullshit) (TBE)


There are many kinds of simple.

Simple life, simple words, simple gestures, simple love. You can't always quite tell if things are just as simple as you'd thought. Not until you're standing on the edge of a cliff, and you can't feel your legs anymore.

It's simple like that: you're afraid. Afraid of what lies beneath the trees you barely see; afraid of the fog bed you are struggling to breathe. Beneath you are rocks that only seem to slip away from your feet.

I remember when I was little, I used to pile my buckets upside down, convinced I have built a sandcastle. Now, I stain my fingers with the ink of a concrete dream but everything only does really just feel like sand.

All I see is the nightfall that rolls down its shades over the beach, depleting of its people; And the storm that grumbles a famished roar in its belly full of clouds. They tease at me with drizzles on my nose, wanting surely to devour me - smack their greased lips between me.

Now all I see is everything I can only almost reach out to. Things that even begin to lose their 'almost's.'

Here, in this treetop house, in a city I still struggle to wrap my fingers around - I am my just born self, desperate for the nectar of life from a mother's bosom.

Here, she is the sky: the moon, the sun, the stars - everything I can still look up to, when my walls are only bare with confinement. They are like steel bars: they are ropes laced like a prisoner's bedroom, dangling head over heels above me.

I am walking only but a thin line across broken sandcastles.

It was never really the storm that brought down my golden fort of pebbled sand. I did not know this then - but I do now. Now, I know the rage of the baffling sea that is ramming in a march; massacre under the galloping hooves.

My only dream for a simple love is swept away now in the air dank of salt; currents filled with bloated bodies and seashells that always lie to the shore, like a false lover, saying that they will stay.

But nothing ever does. Not really.

And that's a simple thing - but that's the worse kind.

5 Cents.

Not enough
I am a glass half-filled
I am a plate unfinished
I am letters in a drawer that remain forever unsent
I am friendships that do not last

Not enough
When the moon has sunken, and my feet still callus over the floor's rough marble
My hands still wilt over cutlery, or blades that cannot stop cutting
My eyelids kissing over and over again, begging to make love to sleep
I hear the torment of the hours that pass too quickly
This will not matter come sunrise
This will not matter come success
For me: I do not quite know success
Only battered breaths, and bruised fingertips, and a slouching chair that swallows me in
This is the only best that I may get

It's been too long that I forget how it feels for my spine to rest upon blankets again
It's been too long since I managed a smile
I have dug graves and tunnels for my arrival here
The warmth of the open air draws a deep sigh
But still, it is not enough
The words of those that share something so unrequited blare in my ears
How my whisper of forgiveness is whipped at with anger
Pleads of this slave's need murmurs under the numbness of my tongue

I was built as with any other man, with arms, and muscles, and veins
A head that will not stop thinking, eyes that will not stop blinking
I am no different from those I see outside the windows of me

But I am not enough
I am an image that hasn't quite finished loading
The unread page that is stuck to its paperback end
I am the lost 5 cent coin from everyone's torn pockets
I am only shattered glass that cannot be puzzled together
Parts of me lie dangling desperately onto the sharp edges of my yesterdays
Clung to tree branches, or molding picket fences

Sometimes I'd like to think that this wasn't how I was made
Only a result of being careless and immature to the ups and downs of the world
That maybe I had already given away too much
And I am now left with not enough more to give.

The Gravity of a Loop.

My head is spinning.

It seems that lately it always is. Maybe that's why I've been so urged to write in these past few days. It is definitely easier to write when you're wrung with a headache. So many thoughts bursting pressure at the walls of my skull, demanding to be released - to explode in a frenzy of tantrums and tears; of begs and confessions.

My head is still spinning.

I hear the noises of my mind ringing so violently, like high pitched bells, my eardrums can no longer heed the pain of it anymore. I try almost desperately to shut my eyes to imagine myself in a safer place, but only God knows that there is no place safer than out here, because inside here it's worse.

When my eyelids are closed, and my lashes curtain my sight, I see things further than that when I am wide awake. I feel my pupils shrink to the size of freckles, I feel the veins creep through my sockets, so swollen, and so filled with agony that it paints the imagery of things so demonic.

My mind is no safe zone, no sanctuary, no place for sanctity or security, but instead a place without walls; without grass, or trees; without pillars, or a roof over its head; not a place to call a home - there is no water to quench the thirst that nearly kills me, and no food to fill this belly that starves.

It is not a battlefield - or if it were, than it was one that had long lost its soldiers to the blood of arrows and catapults - for this is a barren land, with air that cannot fill the lungs, and a scent that cannot leave my limbs.

Mind you, there are no monsters here. No shadows, or claws, or shattering teeth, which in fact, I would appreciate the company of.

Here, there is only me.

Only a sky in the tint of amber, the floor-bed made of blistering stones, the eerie sound of silence, and the warmth of my own breath.

I am not caged, not shackled, but here am free to move to no where: to get lost in the infinity of the place that does not exist, to repeat my steps for years that will never pass, and to remember things I can only keep on seeing. Though even so, I feel like a prisoner.

I am held captive in the dreariness of nothing, where my warden is my own self.

I have the key to leave. I have the key to let go of all of this, at simply any moment.

But alas I am a fool, and I believe I often misplace it. I leave it in the pockets of stranger, in a friend's locked drawer, under my bedroom pillow, or more than naught, in my lover's eyes.

I leave my key in places I assure I'd come back to: in places I thought I could almost call mine, but forget so easily, that I am too fickle to ever own anything.

..

There is no ending to the muse of my writings. I can always go on with the tragedy of my life, with words that fill the spaces of endeavors so perfectly, but I simply cannot find the point of where it will end - because, will it ever?

Most probably not. Most probably I have so long lived in my mind, that my reality is coming close to collision. That now I am free to walk both lands, unbarred, and unlimited, but only endlessly to the goals of no where.

Allow me to trail off this post unfinished now, and leave my being to wander the thoughts that I can barely word in paragraphs. Allow me, adieu.

Stars, Unfinished.

Stars.
Tracing constellations with our fingers.
Books. Reading pages out loud.
Your voice.
And nothing more.
Sidewalk drawings and paper plane smiles.
These are things, I can only almost remember.
Shadows. How they talked.
Dreams. How they felt.
Voices.
Your voice, and nothing more.
The sun tilting over the horizon
The ocean crashing the sand
The grass dancing in the wind
People's footsteps on stairways
Clouds grow midnights in the daytime
You
Your voice
Nothing more
Hands. Teachers. Friends. Mothers.
More hands.
Lovers. Painters. Sinners.
Paperback books.
Your voice.
So much more.
Water.
Pouring hot liquid over dented skin
Drawings lines with cold blades
Blood.
Cuts.
Bruises.
Why?
You said surrender.
I said please.
Blankets now.
Pillow forts, and folded sheets.
Nightlights and flashlights and tail lights.
Bedtime stories under quakes of thunder
Tree leaves shedding
Rain kissing our noses
All those sidewalk drawings, and paper plane smiles



TBE.

Unedited.

Sometimes life feels like a ticking clock

I am standing quietly at the edge of this creaking wooden chair
Tipping its legs back and forth with balls of my callusing feet
I am reminded of times when I threw my head back
Let my thick hair brush in the winds and stroke the sand on the ground
As my body hummed, in the same way it does now: tipping back and forth

Sometimes I worry when my time will come
I write down numbers over peeling wallpaper
Scraping down hardened cement of age and time with cracking fingernails
I am staining these walls with more thank chalk
Eerie light creeps through the gape of the brick
Like water seeping through my skin like a sponge

I still recall the way they laughed at me
When I traced my words in tears that dried up in eyebags that scarred
My skin still ripping off from where I remembered they laid not so long ago
I still see the torn paper slithering down the bedroom door
I thought I would win this
But all I got, was only losing
Like losing poker chips at a gamble of a full barrel
I lost my pride and my dignity to pointing fingers and sounds of joy

Now I fear the smiles and the way breath dances through people's lungs like that
Now I fear corners, and white lights of silver linings
Only the best comfort ever does lie in the motion of a pendulum
I never get seasick, no matter how brash the waves may plummet me
No matter how sunken the well of my chest
Because I have long purged the arteries and the veins of my body's fulcrum

I threw away important parts
Crucial points, and pressure spots
I threw them, like a skipping stones over calm rivers
I watched them ring the water's surface with ripples
The only lines I ever do draw, for now I am only an empty canvas
Reach out your fingers and touch me
You will not feel the weave, or the grain of this fabric
Paint upon me, and watch the colors slide

People call it hollow
I call it how it's supposed to be
Because when you wear your heart on a sleeve, you lose too much
And not to mention, you get your favorite satin dirty

So yes, here I stand
Pushing back and forth the single leg of this chair
I am almost falling, gravity reminds me of the face of the solid ground
You may imagine otherwise, but there is no noose around my neck
Only a chair with legs, dangling upon it as if it were what keeps me alive
I feel the splinters of the unfinished wood spit new wounds, and lick old ones on both my soles
I feel this see-saw motion come to almost a stop
All right before I become crooked nose, and torn lip
You see
I don't run away from pain;
I run into.

Shut.

Like underwater, I am inches away from air, grasping, gasping for the clean cut of the water's surface.

TBE.