One of the Forgotten Ones

Dedicated to Cameron Mo

The voracious listener
Doomed to pity
The feign in her gain
Achieving at best

A thank you
An apology
Sullen and sunken
Dampened and tampered
Accepted, no doubt

As bright and foreboding
Like a billion red lights
Kissing her surface
Critiquing her dry

Letting her know
She’s the best of the best
And leaving her with
The worst of her kind

It Won't Be the Last Time

The sickest feeling resides
It hides
It hurts when you kill
When you scar my pride

Lost in your eyes
I see no belief
I see no trust
No cause for relief

I see only things
I never wanted to see
Lies
Lies
The foundations of lies

The execution of lies
The result of those lies

My expectations of you
They wither
They die

And no,
You can’t hurt me
When you start to cry

It’s sick how you target
The guilt that I hide

Someone Like You

My eyes are allergic
To these saltwater tears
Maybe I
Maybe I
Am in need of assistance

You see,
Someone like you
Can make a girl smile
Can make her forgot
Her woes for a while

Someone like you
Tends to say
Tends to do
Tends to come
Tends to go
On days she needs you most

So where’d you go, handsome?
And can I come too?

I have a feeling
You’ll just make me cry

Thinking Back

12/11/09

Months at a time
I couldn’t help but wonder
If you felt the same
The same way I felt
I felt that day

That day, that day
Didn’t seem much at first
You helped me study
For physics on the train

And you continued to help me
Till 1 A.M.
Signed off after wishing me
Good luck
And sweet dreams

I imagined that night
For the first time we’ve been friends
What it would be like
If we were more

It put a smile on my face

And now
I’m tired of that smile

Long Overdue

Dedicated to Cameron Mo, Michelle Chan, Hannah Chung, Lin Chen, and Justine Yi

Perhaps negotiation won’t do
I’m not going to sink any deeper
No shedding tears in front of you

I need no pity
No guilt-ridden kisses
No clever-worded reassurances
I just need the truth

Yet your form of compromise
Is ignoring the fact
That things have changed

I know you’ve changed

You’re not the boy who calls me
Just to ask me what I’m doing
You’re not the boy who pulls me aside
To embrace me, kiss me
Hello and goodbye
And you’re not the boy
I fell for when
You used to care

Or seemed to care
You cared?

You’re not that boy
Not anymore
You’re not that boy
Not my boy
No more

No more do I want to dwell
Upon the obvious
No more do I want to be angry
At you
At us
At me

Why couldn’t we be perfect
As I imagined us to be?
Why couldn’t you be willing,
And accepting as you ought to be?
Why couldn’t I be worth it;
Solve it, when we finally reached
Our limits?
The tippy-top limit
Our naivety

And I noticed that day
By the red light sign

Abruptly we stopped
Our bodies jerked forward
We sat back and breathed
A sigh
A chuckle

“That was such a close call,”
You had said

Too close
Too close
Too close to the end

Drowning

Safety in numbers they say
The art of counting major mistakes

So soon we pull ourselves to the surface
Unaware of the talent we have underneath
We rely on the air to strengthen our lungs
We allow all our fears to taunt our faint hearts

We assume that our lungs will burst
And will ache
We believe that we'll drown
That life will forsake

And we count all the seconds
It took us to fight
And our failures outnumber
Our one world of blight