Kingdom

I’m walking home. The night sky mirrors my insides. Something is growing, living, breathing. My stomach bloats trying to keep it in. I’m walking like a pregnant lady. And you know how much I despise the thought of being pregnant.

But there’s something in the air tonight. Something that forces the little growing embryo of foreboding that I managed to push under my liver to spring to life and grow to the foetus it’s become.

It’s something about the way the water collects around the little bumps of the road. It’s something about the way the leaves above fill in dark spaces in the open sky. It’s something about the way my heart is thumping so hard, I feel like one of those love-sick looney tunes.

You know I love you right? God damn it, I love you. But I can’t stand the way you make me feel. It’s so real. It’s so grounded, it’s so painful and solid. My love for you is like a giant person. Like a great, big thug of a man. I hate that. Fuck, I hate that. I never wanted to love anyone like that.

I always wanted someone who made me feel surreal. Someone who made me feel like the mystical being I always thought I was. Someone who made me know that I was meant for more than this. Someone who made me feel more than human. I never wanted to be human.
I can’t stand this feeling any longer. The foetus inside, it’s kicking. Violently. I want to regurgitate it out. But it’s too big this time. I know tonight’s the night. I stare at the sky. That big, endless sky that calls out to me. It’s like my name is written all over the little wisps of invisible air that float around me and above me and through my legs.

I’m shaking. I’m shaking. I wish you could see this. See who I am. I wish you could lay my body on an operating table and cut me open. You’d see that under my human organs and my human blood; under my human bones, I’m full of colours and words and flying fish. I’m full of darkness and black holes. I’m a dark alleyway inside, I’m a Wonderland.

There are so many times when I wish you could do that. See everything inside; the hidden foetus under my liver. Take it into your arms and curl yourself up in the space between my stomach and my lungs and stitch me back up. But I know you’d only weigh me down. You’d hold me stead fast to the ground like an anchor around my ankles.

I need someone who will be my helium. I need someone who will allow me to float up into the clouds and find my way to the world in which I belong.

My bulging stomach hurts my back. I see a puddle before me. I can see the street light’s reflection in the water. But as I approach it and look down, all I see is the wet pavement through the clear water. It fills me with so much feeling. My body is exploding; I can’t contain all of this. My pores can’t sweat it out. Tonight, it’s too much.

I breathe out.
I am calm. I’m not panicking. I know my time has come.
I lie down on the moist grass. I close my eyes.



And I see you. I see you see me. I see you approach my tall gates and climb over them. I see you dive into my moat and swim across it. I see you climb onto dry land and stare at my castle walls and scale them.

You jump. You break through the thin film of their world and mine. I see how it rips at your skin and turns you inside out. I see your flesh, raw and red and devoid of blood. I see your eyes hang in their sockets with no lids to keep them in. I see your teeth wide and white with no lips to conceal them. I see your face. You’re so handsome. And as your flesh falls away, I see your skeleton and I see your heart beat behind your ribs. Your heart full of helium, your bones light as oxygen.

I open my eyes and you’re beside me. You lie down and I take your hand. I knew that you would come.

Welcome to my Kingdom.

Disappearing Act

You were my only.
My hero. My reason.

But then you disappeared.
All you left was a shell

Empty of life, devoid of love
The outer crust of your heart.

And as I stepped inside
And searched for your presence

All I found was a lingering of your scent.
I moved around each ventricle

Each artery, each vein.
I stepped over blood vessels

Each pumping weakly,
Their purpose no longer clear.

I couldn’t find you here.

And as I began to panic,
As I began to fall apart,

As I fell down, helpless-
I found a trace.

A footprint from the past,
A strand of memory.

And so,
I followed the steps

Till I reached the start
And found a picture of your face.

I have never stopped searching
Hoping still to find you

But, inside I know.
I know you’ve left this place

And taken your love with you.

The Superman in Me

How do I describe you?

You are beautiful.

When you would walk towards me every morning, I wanted to exist in that moment forever. The moment suspended between the long wait for your arrival and the seconds before you were sitting by my side with your scent enveloping me.
Do you remember how we were before? We were like two islands colliding and losing themselves amongst the tangled brambles and lost wilderness of the other. We were like the Bermuda Triangle. For days, weeks, months- they couldn’t find us. We were gone. High above them, we rolled in each other’s arms and never once looked down at the steep drop below.

I used to believe that all I needed to survive was the watermelon scent of your skin, the pinkness of your mouth and the happiness of your laugh.
I used to believe that you were my reason for birth, existence. I was invincible by your side, do you know? The way they say in the movies and the books. The way you never understand until you’re stripped of each layer and you’re lying side by side with the core of another person and suddenly you’re completely naked, exposed, and at the same time, you are more powerful than all the evils of the world.
That’s how you made me feel.

Like Superman.

But your love made me greedy. The way a rabid animal might want human blood after the initial bite. I wanted so much; I don’t think you had it in you to supply the unending desire that began to take over me, that began to spread through me on the underside of my skin. It spewed out my pores and ached for you, it beckoned you to me. I soaked up each drop. I think I left you dry.

I began to want for your smile to belong to me and only me. No one else should control your emotions, not like I could. I began to wish that you would give up your world to enter mine, or at least create a new one with me. We would be the co-founders, we would be the Presidents, the Emperors, the King and Queen. We would be God and Goddess. Indestructible, invincible. I would be Superman. And you could be Wonder Woman.

But I guess it doesn’t work that way.

If you take too much from the Garden of Eden, you’re left with Pandora’s Box. Or like me, you’re left with nothing at all. With my hunger for you, I drove you to lose your appetite. The flesh of me fell off of you. It wasn’t long before you were emaciated.

I look upon you now, a skeleton- devoid of the love, care, need, desire, happiness I used to plump you up. A scarecrow of our former-ness. And now, the hunger in me for you burns ever on. But I don’t say anything, I don’t cup my hands together and fall on my knees to beg you for a morsel of what I desire. You must think I’ve moved on.
But I haven’t.

You are beautiful.

Sometimes, I don’t know what to do. I want to hold you and laugh with you.
Sometimes I wonder, how can you have changed so much and I still be the same? How can I still need you so desperately and you be so free of me? I look down at me and all the walls are gone. I’m a stump, a legless, armless corpse of who I was before you came. I think back to when my core and your core lay side by side and dared the world to touch us. It was so long ago.

I don’t feel like Superman.
But as I fall off this building, my silent scream bouncing off these city walls, I wish for you to be the one to catch me.