Wings, wounds, and other inventions of the self

"Always an angel never a god”—

Something lifting off my chest to meet your demon—
My heart, racing like an inexhaustible fire-horse, metal.
Only could be an angel, never a goddess eternal.
Wings for decoration. You could never see me fly
Until I learned to stay grounded,
Until I tamed my inner soldier
Learned when to fight or catch fire or flight.
Burned myself
For some light in delight;
Always an angel never a god.

“Always an angel never a god”— line is taken from the song “Not Strong Enough”, by Boygenius.

Haiku as wound

To love you is to reminisce your demons,
Your demon-infiltrated one-man world as I
Enter, as you enter me—my mind, my
Being.

A haiku exiting my body like a wound,
Like a baby. I am not Japanese. Maybe a phony
For cultural appropriation, or just some inspiration,
Innocuous.

Aren't the gates open yet?

Memento Mori in Second Language

A tingling, crawling bug within my psyche
Whispering memento mori.
So I write things I hate on subjects
I love until I get interrupted— my
Self-sabotage, my hopes and dreams fight within.
As I birth more paradoxes, I mirror bipolar weather:
Evaporating floods and threatening thunders,
Silent flashing lights in a purgatory
Indecisive about being born or dying, torn.

Petri Dish

Body a petri dish full of your bacteria, your poison
Served with all this poise, all this grace. Oh, that face,
Oh that body; as I face my body being born every
Seven years with grace, I embody something greater
Than the sum of my heart, lungs, mind—
Somehow I still subtract the mind; spellbound and resigned.

On Being an Impostor (or Calling Myself One)

On being an artist or calling myself out;
How impolite, my urge or my desire to call myself one.
Bridging the gap between being an artist full of expressionism
On the verge of escapism—however paradoxical,
This desire to hide and to be visible:
A chemical mix, a supernova cocktail ticking like a clock,
Blinking. The dance between the light and the dark,
The point I end and you begin.
These endless endings and beginnings beginning again
To end again in a cycle of impermanence Where I bury myself every day
For the sake of making my heart sing in art.
For the sake of making my art sting in heart.

Spoonful of Ocean

Haikus I yearned to write for your goldfish attention span. My ocean was doomed, destined to get lost in your spoon. I got used to watching my soul drown there—or did I feel grand in my destructive turbulence, label it as something I could draw power from?

In a spoonful of
Moonlight trapped—my waves in hand
Behind bars; collapsed.

“Such, Such Were The Joys” Of Sorrows You’ve Gifted

A heartless clinical case
Needing the touch of dr
Frankenstein to come back

How can it still beat in this
Mess, I can only write
In your ghostly presence
Or absence like a Lock Ness—

A need for nostalgia
Or a desire for my disturbia—
Like a child who needs the fire
To learn the discernment of having
A body and fingers—

Even when traveling through
Loveless books like when I am
In the world of political essays by Orwell,
For I feel jarred caged barred.
Staged. I read “such, such were the joys”
And complete it with “of sorrows you’ve gifted”
I am only bittersweet in my poems,
Loud and vicious in my songs and dreams.

I take notes from a burnt charred
Tart of a heart I have been left with,
Or blessed with or messed with,
I have left you a million times with
Yourself and watched you sink deeper
Sink faster every time you had the
Unfortunate chance—

Unconditional love, the murderer of my logic my
Senses can I please come to my senses: I can see you
Stop my whole world dead in its tracks with your
Silly charm getting old like a bad joke. I detest
My heart’s factory settings.

Am I afraid of losing your muse more than I
Am of losing your cursing love?
Such, such were the joys;
The sorrows, the dilemmas
Of a muse I am most ungrateful for.

“Such, Such Were The Joys” is the title of an essay by George Orwell, which inspired the title of this poem.