Smirk

Just by slanting your lips, flaunting your quirk

Sometimes I dream of watching you smirk

That crooked half- smile that slowly nurtures

Sometimes I dream of it kissing my sutures

Squeezing and sucking away all the murk.

A tease of a laugh that works like clockwork,

Something about that mischief keeps me up perk

By nature you know how to torture

Just by slanting your lips.

If I could fix your smile to make it work

Decompress your heart and make it jerk

I’d never try to make it full on cheshire

Because something only in a half-smile that stirs

A kind of passion that could make firework

Just by slanting your lips.

Fire

Sometimes I feel like apologizing to myself for being fire,
For I am not embers waiting to be gathered and ignited
Or a small pyre kindled for the sake of one-night survival.
Because I am definitely not a volcano waiting to erupt
Or the smoke signals that go off
When you leave your iron on too close to the door.
I am fire.
The kind that could burn all of Southern California
To the ground before plate tectonics
Could ever even think of breaking it away.
Because I’ve never flickered like a candle
Or burned out like a joint.
Everything is too much with me,
And nothing is enough to tame the wildfire
That takes hold within.
But there are nights I wish I was fickle like the rain,
Or as flighty as the wind.
Because I’ve become so inflammable
I am afraid that if anyone lights a match near me
They might set the entire world ablaze by second hand
And I have become so combustible,
Terrified someone someday might accidentally
Touch or even look at me the right way
That I’ll burn so mighty as to leave no fire left.
I am so terribly tempted then to just incinerate myself
To see if there is something that peels away at my core

More than this desire to burn.
But sometimes I wish I was like a lighter
So easy to turn on and off, on and off
Or like a light bulb with the sole purpose of burning
Until exhaustion.

But I am fire

Come hell or high water
It cannot wash me away.

I waited…

I waited for my heart to break.

For the earth to quake.

and the floor to rattle.

I waited for the heaviness to seep into my chest.

I waited for the emptiness and the loss of appetite,

I waited for the pain of a thousand cuts

and another thousand sleepless nights.

I waited for the world to end

For the sky to fall and a plague of locusts to descend.

I waited for the contempt to crawl into my skin.

And the most lethal of the seven deadly sins.

But the wrath never came,

And neither did the blades

Time didn’t stop.

No seas parted.

The clouds stay put.

And the locusts kept to themselves.

The stars kept on shining,

I never went cold,

I felt my heart tingle and pull,

But it never so much as shattered or made a sound

No plates shook,

The world kept on spinnin’

The light never went out.