wilting flowers watered with melted icicles

~ april twelfth, 2025 ~

12. existential haiku

bridge of life and death;
created by man and God;
golden and blood red.

Spoiler

@eulogy thank you so much!! I'm kind of surprised you liked that poem, since it was really simple and was just two haikus. But thank youuuu!

~ april thirteenth, 2025 ~

13. because ants don’t have lungs, you silly girl (or the tale of my mini bathroom epiphany)

TW: death

i like to tell myself i’d never kill an ant
i don’t even know if it has blood under its skin
or any skin at all,
just that i should never kill it- b

ut it was just yesterday
when it washed of my hand, or my foot
from clinging on, crawling onto a limb of humanity.
it fell into a puddle of water,
and its legs and antennas began to twitch,
wiggle, grasp onto nothing, from something it could not escape.
its dark limbs splaying out,
imagining itself having octopus tentacles;
i couldn’t bear to watch it struggle,
but i couldn’t look away.
one does not just toss torture into your periphery- e

ventually i saw it stop moving,
motionless.
still.
silent.
and i like to tell myself i’d never kill an ant.
that’s when i- f

elt a tear leak from my eyelid.
all that filled my mind was the thought that
this tiny, miniscule creation of God
-could not breath, wanted to move, wanted to live, wanted to-
shrivelled up like wet paper.
by my hand.
and i- s

lowly began to soak up the water in a tissue.
i thought about how humans, so large, could be wrapped in
flowers and boxes and the thriving, breathing Earth
when they passed.
i thought about how ants, so small,
are wrapped up in tissues and paper when they pass.
i gently scooped its body into the tissue,
ready to put it in the bathroom dustbin.
where he might decay, or he might be found, or ignored by everybody.
he might be missed, or he might not, or maybe not known at all.
but it was at that moment when- t

he ant sprung back to life, crawling out from underneath the tissue.
like i had seen a ghost or perhaps a zombie,
maybe a shocking memory, i hastily threw the tissue out.
of course it was still alive.
because ants don’t have lungs, you silly girl.
i hope it found its way out.
because it didn’t know i cried when i thought it was dead.
me, a human, with lungs and blood and skin
and control over feelings, thoughts, and words,
and life and death.
because i like to tell myself i’d never kill an ant.
oh well.
what even is the lifespan of an ant anyway?

Spoiler

@alliyah thank you so much!! Yes, bugs are very poetic in many ways. Thanks for reading!

~ april fourteenth, 2025 ~

14. a seat at the table

i always find that i
pour too much of myself into too many glasses.
garnished with small mint leaves,
stirred with ice cubes into a sweet cordial,
i empty the jug so others may clink their glasses in merriment.

i have a seat at the table,
oh yes,
but always so far away from it still.
i try to intertwine myself in just one of
the overlapping strings of conversation,
but end up tangled in the knots of verbal weaving.

and when a glass tumbles to its side,
no matter what elbow or hand it was pushed by
that allowed its contents to spill,
it always feels like my own guts spilling out.

it is my napkins that soak up the spill.
the ones i so carefully folded,
knowing they would be unraveled and soiled by the end of the night.
strange how carefully hosts must clean and place
everything in order, all for it to fly to other places and dirty its surfaces.
most napkins and plates are white.

there are times when i wonder
whether people ever really mean what they say in toasts.
and if they do, whether people really agree when they say cheers.
and if they do, whether they smile, clink glasses and drink
because they wish to reverberate those words,
or they love smiling, and they love drinking.
well.
what other reason is there to go to a party?

~ april fifteenth, 2025 ~

15. it's a poem about flowers

i'm sure flowers love to grow by the water,
sparkling alongside the clear ripples of the water.
perhaps a waterfall splashes little droplets of water
onto the soft petals and leaves.
i'm sure flowers love when the occasional canoe drifts
by, and petals are grazed by human fingers, and
aimed in camera lenses.
and i'm sure they don't mind when it rains, or
the air grows a little cold, and
a flower may shed from the stem and plop into the water.
i'm sure they know it may grow soggy,
drain away into someplace infinitely far away,
or maybe they regard it as a chance
to touch life, or part of it that one day
touched or will touch every surface.

~ april sixteenth, 2025 ~

16. an astronomical destiny

(when the moon's silver light is too thin, or
the air is too cold or the ground too solid,
look up to the stars, child.
they draw signs in the sky for
all living things.)
when my great-grandparents couldn't have a baby, they
looked to the stars for help.
maybe they were too young, or maybe
too old, to trust nature or God's will.
i've been told they sought out some
fortune teller, or soothsayer, or seer
who thought that they could
see fate's divine braids in the folds of their palms.
maybe they could tell them something they wanted to hear.

(they were hung in the sky by God's hands just for us,
they watch over all breathing, ebbed and taciturn.
they see things we cannot.)
when the seer gave them an answer, it was
as if the stars had revealed a path, a shape in the sky.
as they were told,
adopting a child as their own
would later bring them a multitude of children that were their own.
and so they did
as they were told.

(you see, i believe the stars were dotted in the sky
as a guide for us all.
it is in the night when God and the Earth blind us,
and it is the stars that remain for us to trace and map.)
as they cradled my grandfather in their arms, they
simply thought about the stars' promise to them,
one this child, a new stranger to the family,
would keep safe for them.
and this baby stranger,
a constellation,
a sign,
a key.
and he was.
after him, he had something of nine siblings,
all his parents' own.

(there is something about them you can't understand,
they always lie above us to dance along with our dreams,
to harmonize melodies of human wishes.)
he was always the other one in his family.
not because his blood was from someplace else,
not because the hues of his color and skin
lay somewhere else on the color wheel.
but because he was the latch on the window.
because he was the cap on the pen.
he was the fleeting glint of a shooting star,
a sign, a promise.

he never felt
celestial, never
the study of an astronomer's gaze, never
an ethereal star carried by God's own hands.
he was a mere pinch of stardust,
a pixel of a telescope's lens of space.
he was never raised to the sky the way a star is,
scintillating,
incandescent,
like a flame in the sky.
instead he stood under the stars,
(they remain a constant,)
looking up, wondering if they ever felt alone,
making wishes, making dreams come true all by themselves.
(as the earth spins, time rolls by,)
no matter what fog hung by the roof of his house,
or what smell of smoke lingered with the absence of love,
(winds change, fires burn, ice freezes and melts.)
maybe it always were the stars that
(make us feel so small,
such tiny creatures in a universe with a
time and fate more powerful than us,
but yet)
give us the brightest sign
that, yes, the universe sees us.

~ april seventeenth, 2025 ~

17. knowledge, in a place above or below us

sometimes, i hope that if i ever go to Heaven when i die,
i can ask to know things from my life that were impossible for me to find out.
if anyone thought i was funny, if anyone actually liked me,
if anyone whispered behind my back or spread rumors about me.
and for some reason i always think this will clear a path in the clouds for
light.

but i think it won't.
i suppose that in Heaven,
we will look upon our life on Earth
like a dream or a hologram,
or a reflection in the water we already passed.
well, what good will it do to
shine a spotlight on something so
old and tattered and forgotten and buried?

maybe i ought to hope to know these things in Hell.
then, while my bones decay and the fires of humanity's worst sins
scald my skin and burn away some bitterness i clung to like a storm cloud,
i'll envy when i lived peacefully, not thinking where these things would lead to.

~ april eighteenth, 2025 ~

18. picking roses

I've always kept myself away from love, I like to think.
Why snip off roses and bury their stems in water when
we could just let the rain make its way down?
So many tapestries woven and sculptures carved
of the pain of losing love.

After all, the closer you pull someone, the
farther they'll have to run to be away from you.
And I've laughed at the idea of falling to your knees,
becoming inhuman for a split second,
for a breath of another human's scent,
a touch of someone else's skin.

Real roses can't break a promise or forget you,
because they know when they'll die.
And real angels
will never lie about how many feathers their wings hold.

It seems strange to melt yourself into something intangible,
unravel your words and fibers of your skin to someone
you think
is
the one.

Maybe because I can never let go of things,
I fear one day I won't be able to let go of something
once I hold it close enough.

Best to stick to picking roses.

~ april nineteenth, 2025 ~

19. epitaph of former shells, part i

the beginning years under the hot sun were the first to go.
no.
not go.
shrink like a faraway statue.
she remembered walks to empty playground with her aunt,
sipping coconut water out of a coconut that she never really liked,
trips to exotic beaches and boardwalks that seemed so close back then,
she remembered climbing on the skyscraper of a bed belonging to her grandparents.
no matter what, it always felt like home, it always felt right.
until it wasn't home anymore.
until she stepped on a metal tube that took off to the sky,
leaving the hot sun to dry up or bloom its plants.
and there was one thing there that she never would feel anywhere else.
the feeling that this is where life took us, and that's the only reason why we were here.
the feeling that nothing would ever change.

it was, a destination, an exotic dream, a fleeting memory for someone who called it home.

~ april twentieth, 2025 ~

20. humans have always wanted to fly one day

there is something within us that is avian.
perhaps before skin molded over our bones,
before we learned to decipher patterns
and pull ourselves up to a tall stance.
or its been there all along.

perhaps it is the way we dress ourselves in plumes,
bleeding colors and striking shark glances of intrigue.
we raise our chests high, beaks to the sky,
fluffing feathers, leaving trails for others to follow.
chirping away with the morning dew settling on leaves,
singing along with the wind chimes, bouncing against each other.

perhaps it is the when we keep our senses keen as an owl,
switching directions, twitching towards slight movement in our periphery.
we hope to catch something never before,
gleam until the shining sun,
spread our wings to feel bigger
than the mistakes, the wax that can make us fall from the sky.

or maybe we resemble corvids,
the way we put in a darker image where there isn't one,
drawing scars and a darkened face on an ordinary raven,
twist and mix the faces of rooks and crows,
separate and combine their differences back and forth,
what hue of black feather to what sharpness of the beak.
perhaps there are times when one bird
looks the same as any other.

but we also draw quills across weathered paper,
dipping in ink feathers we find scattered on the ground.
somehow we formulate intricate words from plumage,
a symbol of weightlessness and delicacy,
or of great glory under the sun.

perhaps that is what separates us from birds.

Spoiler

@Wolfi thank you so much!!!

~ april twenty-first, 2025 ~

21. when time fray like the fibers of twine

one day you will find me in the banks of a river,
a river drowning in dry soil, water receding,
as i cup my hands over the water that remains,
the edges of my dress stained in mud,
but the water never lasting in my hands.

and one day you’ll see me
wandering in a thick mist so far from home,
tangled in the fear of everything being gone,
being blind, being lost.
and the droplets may linger in the air as my spirit does,
or perhaps i will fade into the memoriam of simplicity.

one day, i will explode into a
million
fragments
of
stardust.
the cosmic pull will scatter the pieces to every corner of the galaxy,
waiting to one day be pulled into the birth of a planet
or blown farther away by the vehement winds of a supernova.
or one will be thrust into a black hole, relieved
of all air, choking on the fabric of space and time.
or you will watch as i flutter down like a particle of dust,
iridescent and gleaming in light,
but so,
so far from
home.

~ april twenty-second, 2025 ~

22. somewhere out there is our corner of the sky (show me a reason, i won't show you a rhyme)

Note: The parenthesis part of the title is kind of a joke. Also the title is inspired by a song from the musical Pippin.

there is a place for you
out in the farthest stretches of the morning sky,
where hues of dusk blend into the dawn's glow,
where a sliver of sunlight crawls up to reveal a
fragment of light that touches all things living and dead,
and the sky seems to close, close enough to graze your hand on,
even for a split second, when the world blinks to tomorrow.
there, you will be happy.

there is a place for you
where the songbirds weave their melodious songs,
exchanging chirps and whistles, twisting together
the chords of cacophonous melody, invisible to everyone
but the birds, who sing them for a reason only they know,
in a place only they call home.
where the sounds of laughter ring like wind chimes,
as a gentle breeze threads a needle between sounds
and silence, the most beautiful kind.
you will be happy there.

(i do not know where our place lies.
when life has created so many colors for all different weathers,
when will we find one that roots into our heart?
i used to think that our place was somewhere
corroded with rough ice, blackened by inks of a void.
we were sent there by God or Fate, or whatever we blame for all misfortune.
i wanted to curse to the sky, thrust up my palms that were shaking with blood,
but there was no sky.)
where hues of dusk blend into the dawn's glow,
(there were no birdsongs.)
where the songbirds weave their melodious songs,
(there was nothing.)
but i do know this;
i know we will not find anything dreaming of sweet morning dew
or the intricate tapestries of bird songs.
if there is a place,
it is of a different melody.

~ april twenty-third, 2025 ~

23. untitled

an animal
(squirrel, rabbit, deer)
never inhales
the scent of a flower
(tulip, crocus, rose)
to find one that smells sweet
(like candies and dew and love)
or to ornament somewhere
(a vase, between teeth, the arms of a darling)
but instead to
find out where he is.