you dwell too much
overthinking, impermanence, and letting go - december poems
I. OUT OF BREATH
Run. Run down the hill, pinch your eyes shut, don’t trip but gallop through the grass. Run until space distorts around you and you fall into a black hole portal and lay gasping, panting on your back facing the white sun.
Body melts into mud into my room, the soft touch of fabric that runs like fingers down my spine. Staring up at the ceiling, the blades of a fan are arms outstretched and spinning, dizzy, like drunk on wine.
I hear crows dotting the telephone lines, outside, black wires that grow like threads taut between our hearts. I get burn scars from your liquid-shine – who am I, when not blinded by your lighthouse glow? Toes under low tide, I wait on the shore, for a sunrise that leaks into a rainbow within each cotton cloud.
I crawl through cracked December grounds, bare branches sweep across grey canvas like the strokes of a calligraphy brush – but all I know is that the floor is shaking, ticking time-bomb until I detonate into pieces – do you see me at all? Perched up in your little bell tower. The thread starts to fray, my knees hit wet sand, salt grows into a fist inside my mouth and explodes on my tongue.
Where are you, where are you? Do you hear me at all? Run, slip, fall and crack, my head explodes in a pool –
Breathe. Breathe until the mist clears and you lie on the soil, scent of earth fills your vision. Inhale, until the string loosens around your belly. You can outrun black stars without lifting a leg. Exhale, when the blizzard of notes dissolves into a cadence, a sigh, a pause – your fingers hovering like hummingbirds over white flower keys.
Moonlight flutters in the night like a butterfly lands on petal. Low tide ebbs, rust turns into metal. Snow falls on bare skin & is, suddenly, snow no longer – body melts into white and is buried. No wonder these threads were never meant to stay. Breathe, and you will know – here is all I want to be.
Credits to Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong for his lines ‘snow touches bare skin & is, suddenly, snow no longer’ and ‘Here. That’s all I wanted to be’ from his poetry collection, ‘Night Sky with Exit Wounds’.
II. BARE TREES
hello hello long time no see. i wrote these two poems back in december to submit to a literary magazine at my university. well, they got rejected, which means i can post them on my substack now.
maybe i should revive my substack. i really should make more life updates/ diary entry posts because the last one was in may 2025 and so much has happened since then that i want to think and write about.
song of the day: matt maltese’s ‘the earth is a very small dot’.
this song is inspired by the ‘pale blue dot’, a famous photograph taken from space - our earth is reduced to a pixel on a screen, and what does that tell us about our insignificance? i highly recommend reading carl sagan’s excerpt from his book, written about this photograph, because it is easily one of the most beautiful pieces of writing to ever exist.
anyways, hope you all are doing great! i will see you all next time :)
love,
mihi