i for i
i was asked to chase my dreams. but i felt too
weak.
so i asked myself,
who am i?
i asked everyone this question that day.
‘touch me,’ i said.
someone touched my sternum.
someone touched my head.
someone rolled their eyes. that was mean.
someone went really far so that i became
a point object and then
pointed in my general direction.
finally, my friend said,
‘i don’t know what you are, but
you’re beautiful.’
she touched my soul, that day.
still couldn’t touch me.
which lead me to think
that i am intangible; no one can touch me.
so then i went and chased my dreams.
t for
time
they told me that time and tide
never wait for anyone.
but one night, i was walking home,
and i saw the moonlight reflect off someone’s
kind face
and when our eyes met
the wind stopped rustling
and the cicadas stopped chirping
and time stood still.
so i assumed that they must be wrong.
so i tried my hand at surfing
to see if tide waited too
i guess they were only partially wrong
because i suck at surfing.
i wonder what made time stop
that night.
‘ for
apostrophe
i was first made to show possession
to mark territory, to show
people where they belong.
Susan’s business was Susan’s business.
none of your business.
But then I started to bring people together
conjunctions floored the stage
kind of contradictory to my other job
and it got me wondering why i was even made.
then they thought i was going too fast
and they pulled me down
i started giving pauses
to a stampeding crowd.
two of me, and i’m a quote
a dot above me and i stop what you wrote
for a while.
it gets tiring, being herded like sheep.
sometimes i just want to fall off the semicolon
sometimes i want to sleep.
s for
sometimes
do you think back;
do you miss me?
do you wish you could turn
back time;
do you wish you had kissed
me?
not always; not never.
do the memories hurt;
does it ever pain?
are you forced to draw the
blinds
every time the sky rains?
not always; not never.
do you hold back;
do you ever lie?
do you spin fairytales with
those lips and
tell the truth just through
your eyes?
not always; not never.
o for oh
oh is perhaps the most underrated word.
it can mean anything, depends on what sits with
it.
oh no…
oh god!
oh, sure.
oh well.
oh, boy!
oh yeah.
oh, yeah?
oh dear.
but alone,
it is much more powerful.
oh.
can you feel it?
you beg for an answer, you beg
for something more.
because it means nothing.
and it means everything.
it is the silence that words cannot define.
ironically.
oh.
k for kaleidoscope
they told me i was tripping
when i said i saw the world in color.
the leaves are purple and the sky is auburn.
all the cars are, surprisingly, pink
but sometimes they’re yellow too.
i see the color of a broken family
i see the color of a damaged mind
while others keep dissecting
the color of a newborn child.
i see the colors of people
i see them change colors too
you were grey when you started reading this.
now, you’re a slightly metallic blue.
it looks really pretty,
all the greens and blues and reds.
but the downside of a colored world is that
i guess transparency is dead.
i told them i have
kaleidoscopic eyes.
but they took me a doctor saying
i’m colorblind.
then why is it that colors is all i see?
a for
almost
i'm 99
i'm 23:59
i'm the goodbye said after
the call was cut.
i’m the building in front of
the sunset
i’m Pluto
i’m the outer bullseye
i’m the runner-up
i'm the two palms on
either side of a window
i'm the welled up eyes
before the teardrop rolls
over
i'm quite a lot.
just never enough.
y for yoga
i don’t like yoga.
nothing poetic about that.
