writing – Page 8 – Chia's Blog

Love as repetition

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Incomplete, last update: 2/6/2019 11:44AM

How do I tell you that I think I fell in love with someone on Skype. Their screen name revived by the spam message I accidentally sent, everything unanswered and rewinded. Like I spent my teen years thinking I was better because I lived in another world in my room, listening to 8tracks playlists by all my past lovers. I closed my eyes and listened to the Ending of Dramamine.
My hair is the longest it’s been in years. We bleached it thrice but I couldn’t get it to gray. It’s the darkest and thickest it’s been in years. I wanted so badly to make it wither and gray, anything but how it looked then.

Did anyone ever send you a death threat in BBCode? Or maybe the war we started in phpBB. No amount of trying to get myself to like what you love will fix this.

Do you wonder what you would be like if you were a kinder person? Not anything amped up, just kinder. Forgivable in every sense of the word.

Looking at myself in the mirror with my skin tearing red and my body defeated and slump into the corner of the room to push my body against and against the force of gravity and against and against everything you ever thought of me and I can see the bones on my neck again and I wonder why I hadn’t done this sooner.

I cried the most when I lost all the dreams I wrote down on my Notes app. I think I had over a hundred there.

(I am driving the car and you know I told you I would never drive except for this.)

February 6, 2019

a poem for the evening sun

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I believe in God the Father Almighty,
in false things and delusions; the tap
water running to drown out the sound
of the shivers at seven. In the quiet
moments and the bare body on the
camera or the lost prophet in the home
and altar. Reciting His name again and
again will absolve this household of
sin, we believed.

I believe in emptiness, in ajar mouth
and rewired brains. Tap dancing on
the throe of loneliness and kicking bags
over fences; the presence of smokescreen
or radiation in June evenings–the same
infallible empty. Like buckled belts
and car crash memoir, weighing life
for small games and chances and the
redundancy of trying.

I believe in belief, in healing towards
the dead. The picket fence and the
turn towards atheism, boys equating
running and late nights to freedom for
the drone of the system to repeat itself
again. Where momentarily my verse
becomes a soldier, the escape or done
vow to something again–the summer
solstice and the painted moon towards
revival of mankind and him alone.

I believe in myself, in my body cleansed
with the stomach pumped and the ebbing
of a thousand ancestors before me as
my mouth seeps in the alcohol with the
bowels emptied in a continuous war waged
with the self. Remember killing the crevice
so as not to harm the others, pre-desecrating
my funeral for twig, bark, and journals–
decapitating man with the sleight of hand.

I believe in the hold of wrist, the flicker of
light for prejudice to uphold warmth beyond
the bruises. Repentance amidst the four
time bathroom mirror, the seat the only
altar I bow towards at eighteen. In accordance
with middle school, the repetition of my
life and the blood coursing through your
eyes the lock and sole measure of all
my mortality left. I hear the whisper of a
voice and realize it was never mine.

I believe in your sound, in renewal and
rejuvenation. In cleansing and false Bible
stories and reinvention of all prophets
and ring bearers–in apocalyptic nows
and self-fulfilling suicides. In the tomorrow
or midnight sun, in the remnants of
what is good and what is left in a world
doomed before we had even been born
in it–in time we never asked for. In search
of the gaps, where I mind memory and
equivocate belief with a prayer.

June 29, 2018

Outside Gate 2.5

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Outside Gate 2.5
Here, I am the rich. I, ilk of captive
grasslands; interim of conversation and
strangers of shared descent. This discomfort

will follow – as oxide stains the validity of
tonsils, leaked of coarse throat, straining,
frugal with desire to be heard. I abuse the

story I come from. Here, a gun asks for a
namesake. His crippled hips grin of a lawless
history, scorned of the 70s. Hands shuffle us

inside. Tell us for a moment, we must finally
scream for our own selves. I, voiceless for
a future, has entanglement clock our sameness,

our waning fear of living. Inside, they pick up
all our mangled selves, sputtered of wax; and so
we become ember, holding onto life again. We

become your voice, ascent to fueling the ends
of times, like gunshots splayed of freefall towards
streets. Here, I am the rich, burdened of word –

further, they tell us not to fight again. Further, they
say we do not seek them. To this I wonder the
requirement of boiling my skin, or piecing apart

the words we give in pursuit of breathing human.
Or, so begins the collection of cardboard. Corrugated
certainty – and we never give the name. Here, wither life

failed of repetitions. History lessons: Hilao, Quimpo,
to which the voice is of wax or prestige – here,
never again.

(Never again.)

December 5, 2017