I Am Not Your Missing Line

On By MeiLingIn Free verse, PoetryLeave a comment

An answer to Famous Blue Raincoat

You always liked
to write things down
as if the page could forgive you
faster than a body.

Yes—
he showed me your letter.

Winter, New York,
that careful sadness you wear
like a coat you never quite take off.

You ask after me
as if I were weather—
something that happened
to both of you.

—

Let me be plain.

I was never the space between you.
I was the room.

You entered it
with your questions folded neatly,
your tenderness rehearsed,
your need dressed up as patience.

He arrived differently—
you know that.
Not kinder.
Not crueler.

Just unwilling to pretend
that love is a gentle arrangement.

—

You say he took something.

Men always say that.

No—
I stepped toward him
with my eyes open.

Not because he was better.
Not because you were lacking.

Because he did not ask me
to remain legible.

—

Do you understand
what it is
to be read
your whole life?

To have every silence
translated,
every stillness
mistaken for peace?

You loved me
like a text you were trying to get right.

He let me remain
unfinished.

—

And yes—
there were nights.

Not the way you imagine them.
No violins, no triumph.

Just two people
standing too close to the truth
to soften it.

He did not save me.
I did not ruin you.

But something in me
refused the shape
your love required.

—

You thank him
in your letter.

That was the only honest line.

Because he broke
what would have slowly
closed over me—
quietly, politely,
like a life that looks correct
from the outside.

—

As for the coat—

I remember it.

Blue, yes.
But heavier than it should have been,
as if it carried
all the things neither of you
could say out loud.

He left it once
on the back of a chair.

I did not keep it.

I am not a museum
for men’s unfinished stories.

—

You ask if I am well.

I am not
what you would call well.

But I am exact.

I have learned
to stay in a room
without becoming
its meaning.

—

If you write again,
do not ask about him.

Do not ask about us.

Ask instead
what it cost
to be seen
and not translated.

—

No need to sign this.

You always knew
it was me.

池中蓮

On By MeiLingIn Poetry, TankaLeave a comment

池水無聲，
一朵蓮慢慢開，
似未敢愛。
風過只輕輕動，
影留心底唔散。

The pond keeps its silence.
A single lotus opens—
as if afraid to love.
Wind passes, barely touching;
its shadow stays in me.

A Ledger Kept in the Body

On By MeiLingIn Free verse, PoetryLeave a comment

I was never your “poor boy”—
don’t soften me with that.

I came into the city
with my name held low in my mouth,
not out of shame—
out of knowing
how quickly the world learns to use it.

You sang of winter,
of strangers who take what they need
and call it misunderstanding.

I have known that weather.

Rooms where a woman’s silence
is mistaken for consent,
where kindness is taxed,
where hunger wears perfume
and asks to be called love.

—

Yes—
they hear what they want.

Especially from us.

I learned to speak
with my shoulders first,
to let my body draw the boundary
before my voice was even invited.

To smile—
not as surrender,
but as a blade wrapped in velvet.

You don’t write that part into songs.

—

You gave him fists,
a ring,
a mythology of bruises.

We are given softer violences—

the hand that lingers
half a second too long,
the door that closes
with no witness inside,
the careful rewriting of our own memory
so we can walk back out
without breaking.

Tell me—
where is that counted?

—

And still—

I know the rhythm you meant:

the hit,
the breath,
the decision not to fall.

I have taken blows
that never touched my skin,
felt the tilt of a world
that insists on my smallness,
heard that quiet temptation—

be less,
be still,
be easy to keep.

Almost.

—

But listen—

I did not stay
to be chosen.

I did not stay
to be understood.

I stayed
because there is a force in me
older than their wanting,
colder than their leaving—
a low, sovereign pulse
that refuses erasure.

—

So when I say
I am leaving, I am leaving—

understand this:

I have left hands
mid-reach,
left rooms mid-story,
left versions of myself
that would have been easier to love.

And every leaving
was a kind of fight.

—

I do not need a ring.
I do not need their count.

My body keeps its own ledger—
of what it survived,
of what it refused,
of what it still dares to want.

And I am here—

not pretty with endurance,
not gentle with truth—

but standing.

Still.

The Arm I Carry

On By MeiLingIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I have stood where the light forgets its name,
boots sunk in the grammar of broken ground,
breathing in dust that once was a home—
and no hymn rose, only the low machine of staying alive.

You sang of brothers.
I have buried them.

Not in verses—
in silence thick as wet earth,
in the careful folding of flags
that never feel large enough.

There is a moment—
you know it, if you’ve been there—
when the noise stops meaning anything.
Gunfire becomes weather.
Orders become echoes.
And all that remains
is the man beside you
breathing—
or not.

I have held a hand going cold
and felt no glory pass between us,
only a question
neither of us had time to answer.

You called it “arms.”
We called it weight—
the rifle, the pack, the gaze you carry home
that does not unclench
even in sleep.

Yes, we are brothers—
not by blood,
but by what we have seen
and cannot return.

But listen—
there is no romance here.
No clean horizon waiting to forgive us.
Only the long road back
where every step sounds like memory.

And still—
if I had to walk it again,
I would.

Not for country.
Not for the songs.

For the one who walked beside me
in that unlit place,
who did not look away
when the world did.

That is the oath
no anthem ever holds.

That is the arm I carry—
still.

星期三好鬼玩

On By MeiLingIn Chōka, PoetryLeave a comment

鬧鐘又扮醒，
星期三裝到好乖，
其實心好串。
咖啡跳出杯口，
我笑到企唔穩，
半週都畀我玩。

The alarm pretends it’s awake,
Wednesday acts perfectly innocent,
though it’s clearly up to mischief.
My coffee leaps from the cup,
I’m laughing myself off balance—
midweek is mine to toy with.

The Other Side of Brownsville

On By MeiLingIn Free verse, Poetry2 Comments

You always talked like the road was a witness,
like it kept a ledger in dust and bone,
every mile a confession half-finished,
every name something you never owned.

I remember the night folding slow around us,
cheap neon trembling in a cracked motel sign,
you said love was a thing that outlived the body—
I said, then why does it die in mine?

And the radio coughed up a ghost of a singer,
some worn-out truth wrapped in a tune,
you leaned like a man already leaving,
like the tide don’t argue with the moon.

Brownsville—
you wore it like a scar you kept touching,
like proof you were still made of skin,
but I saw how your hands kept shaking
every time you tried to go back in.

You said there was a woman—there’s always a woman—
standing somewhere between sin and grace,
but your voice dropped low when you named her,
like you feared she might take your place.

I didn’t ask if you loved her or lost her,
those are just words men use for flame,
I just watched how the silence held you
like a priest who forgets his own name.

And the night came down like a verdict unspoken,
heavy as breath on a glass that won’t clear,
you said time is a thief with a patient hunger—
I said, no—it’s the keeping that kills us here.

Brownsville—
it ain’t a town, it’s a wound that remembers,
it’s a door that won’t stay closed,
it’s the echo of something unfinished
in the way your story froze.

You kept reaching for something behind you,
like the past was a coat you misplaced,
but I saw how it clung to your shadow,
how it stitched itself into your face.

And me—
I was never your saviour or sentence,
just a moment you couldn’t outrun,
just a hand that you held in the darkness
when you forgot who you’d become.

So don’t tell me the road makes you honest,
I’ve seen how it teaches you lies,
how it dresses regret up like freedom
and calls it a clearer sky.

Brownsville—
you can keep all your ghosts and your legends,
your saints with their cracked alibis,
I was there when your truth started breaking—
I saw it in the back of your eyes.

And if you ever make it back through it,
through the dust, through the names, through the blame,
you’ll find nothing was waiting to claim you—
only the sound of you calling my name.

Easter Monday

On By MeiLingIn Free verse, PoetryLeave a comment

The stone is still rolled back—
but no one is watching now.

Yesterday held the miracle
like a breath too bright to keep;
today, the air has settled
into something quieter,
more difficult to name.

No trumpets.
No angels rehearsing light.

Only the ordinary returns—
cups rinsed at the sink,
shoes by the door,
a sky that refuses spectacle.

And yet—

something has shifted its weight
inside the body.

Not faith, exactly.
Not joy, either.

More like a door
left unlatched
in a house you thought was sealed.

You move through rooms differently,
touching the same walls
as if they might answer back.

The dead do not rise twice,
and still—
you listen.

There is a softness now
to the way silence holds you,
less like absence,
more like a hand
that does not insist.

Easter has passed
into its echo—

and you remain,
carrying the afterlight
in the small, unguarded places,
where even doubt
feels almost
like belief.

Easter — The Morning That Refuses Closure

On By MeiLingIn Free verse, PoetryLeave a comment

They go with oils—
carefully measured grief
carried in small, breakable vessels.

Mary Magdalene walks first,
not because she is unafraid,
but because love has already undone her once.

Mary keeps near—
not leading,
not behind—
as if she has learned
how to remain
when everything else departs.

And Salome—
quiet, watchful—
holding the question no one wants to ask aloud:
who will move what we cannot?

Morning has not yet decided
to be light.

The air still carries
Friday in its mouth.

They speak in fragments—
half-formed sentences,
as if language itself
has learned to tread carefully around loss.

Then—

the stone is already gone.

Not broken,
not shattered—
simply…
no longer where it was meant to remain.

This is how it begins:
not with triumph,
but with dislocation.

Inside—

no body.

Only space
where certainty used to lie.

I know this place.

The way absence can feel
more present
than anything it replaces.

A figure waits—
not blazing,
not terrible—
just enough
to disturb the shape of reality.

“Why do you seek—”

but the question does not finish,
because it enters them
before it can be spoken whole.

Risen.

Such a word—

too large for the mouth,
too alive for the grave.

And yet,
it does not close the wound.

It opens it wider—
into something that breathes.

They do not rejoice at once.

They tremble.

Because resurrection
is not comfort—
it is a rearrangement
of everything we thought
could not be undone.

I feel it now—

not as light,
but as a subtle refusal
in the dark places of me
that once accepted endings
as final.

Tell me—

if even death
cannot keep what it claims,

what will you do
with a love
that returns
without asking permission?