we stand like opposite seasons, i as the bitter winter, feigning warmth, playing a jazz piano in the background, him as the warm summer, i imagine us basking in the grass together in my mind. yet i am pulled to him like opposite poles, the earth flings us around orbit, but somehow we are glued. i continue hoping i am enough for him as he is enough for me, and maybe a part of him with thaw too. i laugh. the strongest blizzard always comes last.
untitled - this one is from october
there is a space between us. you will never understand me, and i will not to you either. but there is also a current where electricity flows. there were no sparks in the beginning of us, but the path always was there. i do not know from where the power source came, but i wish for its fleetingness, because the wire feels skewed. i know that were are both searching for the path to ground.
Last edited by LuminescentAnt on Tue Jan 13, 2026 4:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
my poetry for him is scattered through pixels and paper, and the ones i haven't written, in my mind. now i see why they all gargle their brains in infatuation. humans are cursed by the flaw of being irrational, and love is the most irrational emotion to feel. we pick roses, even though they will wither into decay in the end anyway.
what i feel is a spring tulip, radiating from the morning dew, pretending life emerges from my icy heart. i just want to relish in this spring before the petals are mutilated by icicles. i wonder if he sees me the way i see him, through a pool of morning dew droplets, or melted ice.
i place him by my bedside table. i dream of a world where we can burn together, not smothered by the rain, without tongues of smoke snaking into the firmament. but reality shakes the sky like a sweeping monsoon, precipitation pours down on me, pounding like a drum. we are too distant, they say, we are not from the same sky, i realize. but we both dream, i tell myself. we are muddled by cloudy aspirations and facades, tracing our hands through the atmosphere.
i keep his heart by my bedside table. we both remain under the fluctuating light of the moon, as the clouds shift and migrate. but we are just two droplets of rain in the end, finding our way to trickle back to some refuge of home.
he appears like the glint of a shooting star, flashing fleetingly across my sky. it is as if he is all the lines between the constellations, tying together beautiful paintings. his stars are still hanging on up there, even as the world spins and the gravity keeps us down. yet he makes me float, up into the sky's embrace, cradling my heart, as it is lit aglow by his light. he is always there.
it terrifies you. like a golden goose in a murder of crows, you shine in your own eyes, but blind to others. there is a pond at your feet, one you wade in with cracked skin, afraid of the noises, the crooked trees, the smell of swampy nature. do i terrify you? you see me as another feather, like a parallel silhouette. i am afraid to admit how i feel, because in the end i remember who gilded your feathers. i do not care, and yet it is always on my mind. it terrifies me.
a river running (this is the early draft of the poem i posted as a literary work)
he knows the lines that trace the earth as well as the pattern of his veins in his wrist. but he does not see the blood that flows within. he has never taken in the rush, never seen the people that dance and sing, but simply as the ink bleeds on the paper.
he speaks to me in a low voice, fizzling out the distance between us. he tells me things no one else does, or things i never believed before. i write about how he encapsulates warmth, and now i feel the blood pulsing beneath my skin, and yet i still fear touch. i swoon at him only in the interim, a time spent clotting wounds, and imagining something.
somehow he does not make me feel like i am his, like a mirthless possession of permanence. we both belong to no one, but we are tethered like orbiting planets. i still cannot read what is beneath the skin, although he appears to bleed everything to me. i fear he will not absorb my sanguineous soliloquies, and think only of the outlines of land masses.
i feel the ice withering away from my fingertips. i shrink in worry that the rays between us refract and do not reflect. he says i am insane. he reminds me how he paces in wait for me, hoping to see a glint of light momentarily, before submerging back into the sea of inky, expansive sky. i nod, and almost shed my rivers of melted glaciers, for how celestial he thinks of us.
we are shifting chromatically, bending gradients and shimmering hues of light. we are each others' beacons, a constant flowing sphere of luminescence, circling, lingering, flowing back into the same stream.
the radiance illuminates something within us each. for him it is his gentle nature, his embrace of compassion. for me it is the pillow of comfort, tranquility, rest, the idea of the ice dissipating, leaving room for the bed of flowers to simply bask under the sun.
we hold light for each other, and these fragments of light that sliver between the clouds let something bloom underneath.
vermillion canals (this one isn't about him *gasp*)
i am unending veins of blood, sustaining off pure drainage.
your river, vital in its chopping waves will be ocean blue under my skin.
take all myself, a love-dazed juliet once said, ready for the bouts of crimson to sprout out from her tender flesh, and gush her lover in affection. those white mulberries were darkened in scarlet, pyramus's streams of life, the ones he gave up instantly at the thought of tragedy, and for the loss of love.
and yet every creature who loves must have veins to accompany a heart. where that blood comes from is found in the depths of vital infatuation. your love infinitely flows, no gash or wound to drain out even the last dregs of the liquid of life.
the sky is never really so dark as it is when your body is empty of blood. and yet the sky is never so bright as it is when you are in love. the sanguine ink never really washes off your hands, or filters from your winding ruby creeks.
you will flow about every part of me, my love; but here is a paper cut, so you can see the sun.
Last edited by LuminescentAnt on Sun Mar 01, 2026 5:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
this world is vast - you do not push a current or initiate a wave. this water never leaves this world, and neither will you, really. your luminescence will shine for the interim before being put out like a candle, but without the wisp of smoke withering.
your sting is impermanent- it is fleeting, then again, as is all pain, no matter how much it clouds the vision. you will never see clouds, and yet your vision is constantly blurred.
but you push, you reach out into the abyss, where there is no path, no paved brick road to finality, and yet you light your periwinkle glow. you ebb and undulate toward nothing, not to change or to fulfillment, but as an ever-spinning glass marble, so beautiful in its opaline delicacy.
there is no real end.
Last edited by LuminescentAnt on Sun Mar 01, 2026 5:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
i can understand the malay my mother and her friends speak like mirror fragments. i wonder what it is like to live life knowing you can weld the gap with words alone, you can have two identities, and flip through them like cards.
like any other foreign language, malay sounds fast and aggressive. in reality, malay conversations are strangely polite. one person will just talk, of a story, of an idea, of an opinion, for a long stretch of time, and others just listen and nod, as if they are in an amphitheater, listening to the voice echo along curved walls. americans are really the brash ones. you always have to say something, or else people will forget you're there.
i don't try to interject in malay. i am afraid of trying to voice something in a manner i do not know fully. like weaving a tapestry with an unknown fiber, it is insightful, but one can always tie the threads into knots.
i am not american, really. and not singaporean. there are people who still seem to see us as oil in water, there to mingle but never to mix. no matter how much i blend into this world, i can never shift across the color wheel. i've never been ashamed, really, but there are times when i feel the eyes (of blue and brown) think i am not immersed enough in one glass to be part of the syncretized cocktail.
it is a shame that we all have identical organs and the same shade of blood and yet we dwell on words.
they say i am soft and sweet like custard. milky, full of tender joy and brightness; simplicity. i am not rough on the tongue, my taste is plain but satisfying, never a wrong turn, never an odd crunch beneath the teeth. i am filling.
they say she is harsh like bitter grapefruit. she peels her skin, to reveal her true colors and fibers, and there are times when she falls apart like withering petals, or dying skin. she is beautiful, but she is unsettlingly disappointing, one expects sweet life to come from a fresh fruit.
needless to say, i am constantly sifting away the crystallized lumps of sugar. a never-ending flow of butter, i please and i please and i please until i don't anymore. until they are tired of the same map of caramelized sugar in their mouth.
maybe she envies. maybe she does not. maybe she thinks of it not at all, maybe i am the bitter fruit rolling down down down the hill to nowhere. i am nothing without the tempered heat to bring me from raw liquid to delightful confection. she needs merely the branch of a tree.
it's all the same anyways. no deep hunger has been replenished by citrus or by cream.
the boy I love is constant in his state of merriness. no matter the height of a tidal wave nor the severity of a gust of wind, he returns to his state of happiness always, not a note off from the right pitch.
I have longed for this feeling like an ache in the back of my mind. but I know I will never experience this.
I view the world in vivid saturation, giving colors the ability to morph into distorted wavelengths. meanwhile he sees only in silhouettes, or at least that is all he seeks. he is as pleased by the tiny chime of a bell as one would be to the cacophonous reverberation of a symphony. one would be satiated by a few drops of water if one is a flower of the desert instead of the rain forest.
quite simply, he lives simply, and the less you take in, the less you want more of.
i envy him. it is the one thing about him i resent. one day, i want to return gently to the shore, not a care in the world of any tsunami, past or future.
his gentle tone of voice is so contrasting from his regular vivacious air, i find myself second guessing his genuine feeling. i have spent so long focusing on the frost that burned my skin that i have forgotten how to trust the sunshine.
he tells me he loves me like a forbidden word, i am shocked by the softness of his lips, and the roughness of his cheek. he spends his time in longing for me, but i wonder if i truly feel the same. i have shifted from the general to the soldier, the bloodlust still in my heart, but now with the gun in my hand. you start to question everything when blood is splattered on your face.
but i am struggling to stand ground in the tornado. the winds pull me to consider if this is all wrong, if i am wrong. i have never been right about anything logical, treating my heart as the beacon. yet i question if this light is as synthetic as the twisted mask i have weaved for myself for years.
the only thing i can be sure of is that my blood is unending, my heart immortal until it is not, and then i will have no mind to question anything.
you probably wonder how i can love bouquets of clovers. why i don't yearn for tulips, why i don't sulk at the plain greenness of this garden.
really, i still love flowers. i do find it strange how we are attached so deeply to scent, almost as deeply as we are to words or colors. a wilting flower, retaining a sweet smell, would still feel like a beauty of nature. only in dryness does a flower lose its beauty.
i do not know what i seek out. it is beauty not in the way of soothing appearance, but familiarity, childhood, the return to the prairie.
i like to feel lucky, i think. the simple pleasure of discovering a singular surplus of a leaf on a tiny plant is like that feeling of - finding things for not permanent, tangible satisfaction, but the feeling of uncovering life in the wake of so many others.
i know how to love a flower, and to love a clover, both enough to be a painting on my wall. some day i'll scorn how i stay in the grass.
