Somebody once told me,
in our tender embrace,
“Love is all there is.”

I told him to take it day by day,
to live and love in the very moment.
For I would probably leave him the next.

He took my advice
and stayed in love with me
every single moment he existed.

I only exist in fragments of time,
and so is my love.
You had me whole
in a night of tenderness.
I knew kindness and bliss
enough to turn you into a sweet memory.

“Why can’t it happen again?
Why do you have to turn me into a memory
the moment you walk out of that room?”
You said I lived and loved
as a story teller.
Quite a story you were.

I cannot keep killing you,
but you are not able to let me go.
Perhaps I am not either.

Thus I wonder how to write a wonderful story
without having it falling in love with me
or myself falling in love with it.

Let me take you to the realm of the past.
You know it was not pretty, you know it was sad.
But it was me before you arrived;
I was darkness before you were light.

I went through many lifetimes, many fights,
many women, many regrets.
I’ve never stopped loving any of those eyes
when they looked at my back as I left our beds.

The nights when I sneaked out and made phone calls,
tried to pretend that in the morning they would be all gone.
I thought I could hear the sighs, so soft,
tearing through the blind of darkness like thorns.

The same torment you all inflict upon yourselves
has got me immunized. I’ve watched every single one
walking out of my life after slapping on my face.
Where do you draw that strength from such little hands?

I feel you wanting to run away from me.
I feel you growing scared, worrying you have already
fallen into a deep trap. But neither of us
is meant to escape love, this love we have.

You tell me you’re smelling death, and your face
has turned purple. I sit and watch you
struggle with your emotions, with your pains,
and as always I feel completely helpless.

If I ask you now, “Do you love me?”,
you will say no. You are still in love
with him. Have you ever, for a split second,
realized he only exists in your mind?

You are fearful and so am I,
we are as flawed as the world we live in
and it is alright. Those who long for ideals
always find a way to survive disappointments,
or shall I say, reality.

The only ones who have committed suicide
are those who think they could put up with life,
who underestimate the way vanity takes a toll on them,
and at the crack of the sky, find themselves deceived,
so they jump under the flat surface of hope,
get everything in them shot with multiple bullets,
until it is too late to realize the lack of meaning
of their final decision, like many preceding others.

We are not like that, my love, and we love,
and I will make you love me instead of him,
because I am real, and so are you. I want you
to know how hard it is to want another person.
And our shared darkness has just only begun.

I am thinking of you,
the sincerity of your thoughts,
how you deal with emotions,
you do not know any better than running away,
in circles of isolation,
and when I restrained myself from running to you
and gave you time and space,
you thought I gave up on you.

“Did you really think I would give up on you?
I was the one who thought you gave up on me.”

“No, why would you ever think so,
if nothing had happened, if there had been no clue
of me leaving?”

We keep each other hanging,
as this rising discomfort
tightens around our neck.
We keep questioning ourselves
and others that we love
and us.

“Don’t give up on me,” you said.
How could I?
Do you really think I know how?
We are just two helpless creatures
facing each other
in the midst of our craving for affection.
So much to give, so hesitant to receive.

What are we going to do now?
If we are so alike, is it wise
for us to, maybe,
you know,
fall in love?

The rainy days in this town,
the trembling wind, and how
I live so close to the river,
which turns grey as the water
rises with millions of bubbles ,
remind me
of home.

Home is only a restless sleep away.

Over that vast ocean, on the dark sky,
I seemed to be the only one awake,
so wide awake in my thoughts,
knowing I could, or perhaps not,
find myself again.
Maybe you, too,
have lost yourself in between
two pins on a map.

But I am not on that plane.
I am sitting
at the high coffee table,
hearing the wind howl
around the trees, as my window
is left open.

And I wish I were light enough
to be carried away
not to home
but somewhere, somewhere else,
I do not know,
maybe some ocean sea
maybe some tall mountain
or wherever without the humans
and there, leave me in the heightened cold.

Though I would rather
for that mighty wind
to be strong enough, so my departure
would not take too long.
I hate things that linger;
they never do me any good
Things, like memories,
pain,
longing,
goodbye’s.
Thus I whisper,
“I’ll go now, and please,
make it quick.”

But my wind,
so distracted by the rain,
keeps passing without hearing me.

I’m telling you,
it is not so easy, after all,
to be granted such a simple wish
on a rainy day.

I miss you: the unique tone of your words,
the high and low notes of your voice,
the way you hold your wine glass
– how I adore your rough, handsome fingers! –
the shape of your smile,
the way your shoulder blades stick out,
the angle of your hips,
the length from the bottom to the tip,
and
the subtle sadness in your eyes
when I place my lips on you,
dance my fingers around you,
feel the furthest point of your body
under my tongue, leaning
against the back of my throat, and then
your hardness fall between my softness,
as my flow of life blends into yours.

Yet my memories, my deepest ones,
started one early morning
when you said hello to me,
when you were so gentle,
when you were still the unknown,
but somehow,
closer to my heart than you are now.
The more we know about each other
the further apart we get, even though
we have become more casually comfortable
with each other’s presence, the growing intensity
of my emotions,
the endless, exhausting questions
from the part of me
that longs for what we cannot be
together.

I imagine there’s a kind of love
in which you can’t let me live
because you love me too much.

Because you think
death could freeze time.
Because you see
nothing else could stop time
but death.

You want my memories of you
fixated
at the moment where things are still good
before I could watch you
being consumed by your monster.

Rain chasers,
how I’ve known them.

They smell rain from a far distance,
watch the clouds in precise anticipation,
catch the first drop and raise to their lips,
and it either turns sour or sweet.

When they know the rain will go foul,
they tell themselves to make another round,
to seek more rain, more rain, and more rain,
until they lose their conscience and become vain.

When they know the rain will be sweet,
they do their best to hold on to it,
knowing it will not stay forever,
but rain chasers despise the laws of nature.

Once I joined their force and began the game,
and I found my first sweet of rain.
I tried to preserve it, like all the chasers,
then it was gone, like sweet rain always was.

Many raindrops have touched my lips ever since that day.
Some sweet, some sour, yet they never stayed.
And somehow it is still quite hard to forget
how I felt after that one left.