#dictionary poem

1. If you call who I am unholy, then you are going to find me dancing a tango with the devil under a blood moon night. My spine is a steel edged sword and I have been called enough variations of unnatural and disappointment that I embrace those words like donning armor.

2. This is what it is - wild, untamed beauty and chaos which cannot be contained. You see damnation and I see the fire in Achilles' eyes when he looked at Patroclus across the battlefield.

3. This is what the truth is - people are afraid of what they don't understand. It has always been and it always will be a crime to be different. Your condemnation has been made law.

noun

the sunshine leaves an outline around his outline. i drink his silhouette up like cheap vodka. 

it’s nauseating, how much i wantneedlove you. i want it to be pretty but i think we all know it’s not. 

he’s never said her name to me. never acknowledged her existence. and yet she’s the loveofhislife. everyone knows it. however, she seems to pause along with the rest of the world when he reaches to me. 

i gave up on my morals a while ago. it makes me more approachable. everyone agrees. 

an apple sits. it rots. it is sickly sweet. slowly, this apple becomes to decompose. bugs eat at the flesh until it is nothing but a shriveled core. that is tossed to the woods. a wild dog mistakes it for prey and attacks it, leaving it mutilated on the forest floor. 

i hate him. he’s stupid. he’s attractive in the sense that he attracts me. he is the vinegar and i am the fly. he jokes i sound like a fly because im always buzzing. i never shut up. i say well makes sense that you’re vinegar. you’re pretty hard to swallow too. 

you leave. a thousand times again. i am like a beaten yet loyal dog. i sit and i want and i wait. i know you will be back and i think that is the everworst part. 

-walk aimlessly

-meander

—

/see • NGAO/ noun [Filipino]

1. mouth ulcer or canker sore

When we were children, we were told that the quickest way to relieve singaw was to swish salt water in our mouths, apply bitter liquid medicine directly (gently, gently) with a q-tip— neither remedy a painless one.

In that split-second immediate burn, our caretakers shared empty comfort— it’s supposed to hurt, it gets worse before it gets better — so we learned to keep our sores to ourselves, tonguing the tender, open flesh, caressing the hissing, open wound, gently nipping with teeth— definitely making it worse before (finally, finally) it was better.

2. a steam or leak, usually with a bad smell; typically used in verb form such as sumisingaw /soo • MEE • see • ngao/ (to leak out)

Sumisingaw na ang katotohanan. The truth comes out in all its hideous forms: behind your iron curtain, the marble tiles laid over concrete meant to entomb your mistakes— you can’t keep your skeletons buried forever.

Gather the blooms from your gardens built on thorns, arrange them in your precious, unearned Ming vases, stage them in your stolen rooms— that unpretty decay will seep through. Spraying perfume with abandon cannot mask the smell of rot kicked under the rug.

Decomposition happens out of sight, maggots wriggling towards the heady musk of a meal. A corpse preserved and buried undeservingly with heroes is still worm food.

Tussaud trickery does not make a saint. Only tyrants fixate on divinity.

Go. Write your own novenas, delude yourself further into thinking you are the blessing. Adorn yourself in your rewritten histories, but the truth speaks for itself: Every harvest since only bears spoiled goods. The rot lingers, only made worse by those who share your warped nostalgia. The rest of us pray for a sense of relief. If this is the worst, when does it get better?

— Jade A. & Noey P. ( @thenoeychu )

escapril day 17: truth

Bor•der•line

/n/

1. It’s all about point-of-view. An ant crawling up an oak, watched by a squirrel among the leaves, who’s spotted by an owl soaring through the open sky, nearly visible to those on an airplane as it rises just passed the skyline, with an unfathomable number of stars above, encompassed by infinitely more galaxies that stretch up and over and beyond, reach to the edge of creation.

2. From my point-of-view, stars always reminded me of you. Specifically, how your eyes seemed to quite literally twinkle when they met mine and you smiled. They say you can tell the stars from the planets based on if they twinkle in the night sky, and I knew at once that you were a star —bright, powerful, and doomed to burn out.

3. Time is the master of vision. I have this memory as a child of sitting on a horse that was as tall as the barn ceiling. But I was wrong; I was fooled by my age, my eyes, my wisdom at the time, and now know reality isn’t always what it seems. That however real the current that flowed from you to me each time our eyes met, doesn’t mean the same thing now. Time is the master of memory.