good morning, kelly

i’m floating dizzied, fever-dreaming out of lime and sandstone and sea salt into the thrum of voices in my spine crawls with concrete can’t speak i’ll just breathe the humidity, the fluid acidity of hong kong makes it the most beautiful city in the world is vibrating endlessly with voices who count together the hours past midnight, one two three four for death so we wrote it out of the floors the wards the morgues we have no time to sit, drink tea, we overlook the shining sea and we are content

1. denial comes in many forms and tonight it turns you into the hungry social media guru: you crawl your network, refresh your email, scour your feeds, hunting—scrabbling—longing for scraps of news. anything. the hours roll past without you— you, who have already lost. 2. anger leaks out of you like a dripping faucet, but instead of water it’s dripping blood and the faucet is on fire and everything is on fire and you would rather goddamn die than have to sit there in a hollow classroom where her stuff is still piled neatly on her desk and your teachers are still weeping and you, you of the thick glasses and the heavy coats, never once told her you loved her when she was around to hear it. 3. helplessness because what better to remind an invincible teenager of their own mortality than assigning homework one last time and walking out of their life forever? helplessness because it wasn’t supposed to happen like this it wasn’t supposed to end like this

the simple fact was that 1. my parents were going home 2. i wasn't.

have you ever sat down with someone and talked with them about what they really, really, really loved? have you ever texted the one with the dark hair and the spider fingers late into the morning and watched the little text bubble shrink and grow a dozen times until she decided which words to pluck from the stars to condense her unending love for Tchaikovsky into one hundred and forty characters? or maybe have you ever watched the other one’s fire-blue eyes and seen the universe erupt and bloom and blaze and fracture with a million different things they want to say, a flowering star brimming with endless possibility, about where they’re going and where they’ll be, a legacy for themselves carved out of bone-dry clay, which -- never doubt -- is only up, up, up? i have. i have. and maybe i don’t know how to pronounce bungjook and kookchan and hyungjae and maybe i am a straight-edged flat b plus student and maybe i’ve lived in america for eight years and still don’t know how to follow baseball and maybe i am just me -- but dammit if in that moment i don’t love k-pop and music and sportball and history and art just as much as you do, because i love you.

start off slow. when you started writing this, you added a teaspoon of faded imagery here and there - sunlit skies, starry climes, a rhyme or two you bought off a wandering jew so you could rhyme blue with hullabaloo. but wait - we’re getting graded on imagery, right? that’s what the rubric says, to you - two OR MORE metaphors sprinkled with salt and two OR MORE similes, like drops of dew in the… glue. oh no you only have ten lines out of the required fifteen time to pick up the pace, use only enough commas to sustain a starving english teacher and pick up the pace, repeat the same phrase over for emphasis and pick up the pace, alliteration is always an answer and pick up the pace, you are a symphony of ebbing and flowing cosmic rhythm and you will pick up the pace, but now you’re kinda exhausted from spitting these words that only like half the class understood when they heard and that movement is done so now you can sit back and relax and pause for emphasis and drop volume and finish the poem before saying all the things you always thought you would but can’t.

i’d like to point out that there are so many ways we could all die in the next three minutes and not one soul on the face of this planet would be, in any sense of the word, prepared. there would be no lingering goodbyes or aftertastes of love or stolen kisses - none of that nostalgic spielberg nonsense - just a storm of gamma radiation scouring the face of the planet clean, or an unforeseen asteroid the size of a city slamming into our thrones of twisted glass and metal, or the magnetic field of the earth itself reversing, but in this storm of black holes and numb probability and sparkling clouds of ancient civilizations and the extremely slight but still very real off chance that a metastable vacuum will materialize and tear apart the fabric of space and time - somehow you made me feel at home.

the universe, they say, unfurled like a teenager going through puberty from a single point infinitely large and infinitely small and incomprehensibly dense and everything there was - the planets, they say, spiraled in their cosmic ballets in perfect ellipses around an unforgiving fireball, aggregating rings and moons and glittering with blood red storms and seas of diamonds and inviting the children on the third rock from the sun and saying come here, i am yours to discover - we, they say, clambered our way out of the darkness of prehistory and evolved, killed, survived, got better at hiding and burning and loving until we were masters of our own gods, until the dirt beneath our muddy feet and the crystalline sky thrown like a blanket on our shoulders were ours to mold in our own image - some people say these explanations of cold probability make no space for a creator of the universe, an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniloving God with a capital G- if there’s one out there, i hope they know i love them even more because of that.