Dandelion

Only time witnessed the change
To this flower in the middle of the field
Almost drowning in the vast green
Almost undiscovered by eyes.
As I walk amidst the tall swaying grass,
My hands are barely touching the blades
And the air smells softly of the summer sun
The same yellow this flower used to be.
I caress the aged dandelion delicately
But it falls apart so easily in my hand,
So fragile and so promising 
And though I wanted to hold onto it, 
I opened my palm and gave into possibilities.

The Groundhog Force

The groundhog in my backyard, whom I've affectionately named Philippe.

Smoke

The smoke over the water
Slowly shape into familiar forms,
The silhouette of lovers,
Holding onto each other
Before they drown in air.
But they might as well be letting go
For time steals breaths,
And though your scent lingers
All I'm left are wisps of you.

It made me face palm and laugh

You'll Never Know

Sometimes people let you down.

Into the Night

9:00 pm

You forged those words with the heat of your rage

I opened my mouth to retaliate

But found my troops frozen in my throat’s cage

Held captive by my silence, stalemate

The space between us was a no man’s land

Where words became empty shell casings

Fell, as their force flied on at your command

Sending me into a night that thus sings

10:03 pm

I stood in front of the doorway

The wooden frame, a line,

Separating this painting to the one in my eyes

And as I took a step forward, it all became one

One where the lapis sky still had hints of the day

Making me chase down the remaining sunset

Which I can never capture except in these words

Words drawn from the same darkness of night

I draped myself with this night, wrapping my wounds,

And I found myself wandering into a world

Where light had gone to sleep

11:33 pm

My pupils grew as they drink in the dark

Learning of hidden angles never before seen

There I saw, a man beneath a tree in the park

Disheveled, I silently questioned his hygiene

He wobbled like a wooden chair with a worn leg

Leaned against the bark before falling to the green

I would’ve passed him by if not for his pitiful peg

He looked at me and beckoned me closer for words

“Just give me a couple stars of your night,” he beg-

“Gedanken experiment we will play in thirds.”

Despite the wandering hands of his reek reaching up my nostril

I stayed for the slight wisdom in the words of drunkards

He began the story in a grand way like a minstrel

Plucking away at the lines of his hands

Soon I was enveloped in his words’ tendril

He did well to cater to my curious demands

As he spoke on about the lines of his life

Of how he was given no lifelines by this waste land

He attacked the lesser chances with bitter strife

But it’s so easy to fall prey, so easy to fall prey

To emptiness, when at your throat is society’s knife

His eyes grew reflective and I watched as a shard break away

Cutting a streak down his dirty cheek; he said they’re not tears,

But alcohol overflowing to sanitize his wounds that have turned gray

Why do we leer and sneer when his plight is too, our fears?

This is our stench wafting gently into the sweet air of the night

I closed my eyes and saw the same darkness all these years

12:00 am

It’s the prelude of a new night

I closed my eyes and saw the same darkness all these years

I opened my eyes and found the world the same sight

Except for the street lights that illuminated the silhouette trees

My eyes followed the black branches up to the sky

Where the artist drew them fading into each other seamlessly

1:00 am

The moon was quietly floating among stars

Sighing gently in the dead of night,

Bringing about the quavering tides 

Tonight I took the time to observe it intently

There I saw a rabbit hopping along the craters of a man’s face

Bringing medicine to quell the moon’s sighs

A cassia tree stood stoically on its surface

I watched as a woodcutter with a scythe

With a Sisyphus task of cutting it down

Then there was Chang’e, whose expression I could not read,

Whose story we will never truly know

And I wondered if she misses the solid ground of Earth

I hopped along the dark pavement

Next to a tree whose roots held onto life

Longer than I have lived

I walked up and touched its rough skin

Carved by years and lovers’ markings

And it will be the only one in time that remembers

2:00 am

I was walking towards the city lights

The wind brought with it a strange coldness

My skin raised goose bumps to try to slow it down 

The artificial lights teasingly touched the back of my neck

Sending a horrible shiver down my spine, afraid,

I saw sharp shadows trying to crawl out of dark alleyways

Lurking and luring the naïve into its possessive embrace 

3:04 am

There was something in the air

As the wolf howled at the sighing moon

Calling the night creatures out to play

They crawled out gleefully from under the rocks,

Some late night bars, and from behind those words

It was too late for me to take cover

As my shadow crisped in the light

They approached me, their shadows engulfing mine,

Their ghoulish smiles evoking pessimism,

Such darkness, as they sank into my pupils

Searching and prying for hidden sights

Suddenly my fears were awakened

As ghosts made themselves consciously present

My subconscious flooded with sweat and tears,

And suppressed memories of ache and failures

Despair stepped forth and took my wet face in its hands

Lifting so I could stare at him eye to eye

I shuddered involuntarily and was overwhelmed

By his drumming of my heart beat

That my tears became black ink

I was so close to drowning in those words

So close to giving up the lines of my hand

And surrendering to his command of the night

Until an infant’s cry pierced through his haunting stare,

Shaking me from this living nightmare

4:29 am

I sat on the ground a good while

Trying to recollect my senses

As the wisps of the past started to dissipate

Though the uncanny darkness still remained

My hands were balled up so tightly,

My finger nails were imprinted in my palm

Crescent smiles, those smiles still dwelled,

The shadows lingered, into the night

5:24 am

I was blanketed beneath a dark gray sky

A shade the artist painstakingly mixed

My footsteps echoed softly

On the pavement of a different gray

Bloodshot eyes and tightened lips

I looked down at my hands tinted by the night

Half wounded by the night’s excursions

Half fatigued by the weight of these words

So I was dangling off of these lines

To keep myself from crumbling

6:31 am

The night retracted its fingers

Releasing its grasp of the world

I watched the shadows shrink

Slowly

The painting blooming into colours

Things that had been lying as stones

Now stirring awake and amnesic

7:05 am

Day breaks

7:14 am

Tick-tock

7:22 am

These words

7:32 am

Tick-tock

7:40 am

Ink from the night

7:55 am

Still

8:00 am

The sun swept over the land

Where night once dominated

Sending shadows into frenzy

The sky had licked an orange lollipop,

Watching the people beneath

Hurrying like ants, going nowhere

The moon faded away with its sighs

Replaced by song birds with their wordless songs

But I could still see with my constricted pupils

For sleep has not made me blind

Nor could I forget

The traces of the night

9:10 am

It was time for me to go back to us

Retracing every step and every word

Still afraid and unsure of our status

Our hearts red dark, too proud to step forward

We both reached for the door knob at the same time

Life’s cyclical way, written in this rhyme,

Written into the night.

Entry for this year's competition... Proud of this one too. Can you catch all the devices I've used? 
October 4th, 2012: So I was reading through my previous competitive entry and realized that perhaps I should try and explain this one a little more than I had. 

The main inspiration for this poem is the idea of circularity, which I tried to express with time and with the journey that the protagonist goes on in the story. The most difficult part of writing this was my wanting to be witty with when each section should start. The first section started at 9pm. The next section started at 10:03pm because it took me 63 words to write the first section. To put it differently, each word stands for a minute. But it's hard to keep that consistent since sometimes I need more words to express what I want to say. So sometimes, it is the number of characters, the number of lines that are equivalent to each passing minute (it is consistent IN each section, but differs by sections). I had originally wanted to do a 24-hour cycle instead of the 12-hour one that I wrote, but I felt that half a day was sufficient for me to dictate the 180-degree change that the character went through, while at the same time, maintaining that circularity. (...Or it might've been that I didn't have enough time to do 24 sections. :P)

In order to tie the beginning to the end, the first section is one half of a sonnet (the first two quatrains) and the last section is the remaining (the third quatrain and the couplet). It started out with a fight between lovers and ends with the reconciliation. Because as I have said previously, love is always the reason, the life of poetry. It's a foundation that I cannot shake in my writing. 

It might've been Donne's influence on me (since I took a seminar on his work), that I felt compelled for my work to self-reflect. The artist, the ink, all these self-referrals are my desire of wanting the reader to realize that I am sitting here writing this poem, literally, into the night. And that I am borrowing from the night's elements to write this, hence the emphasis (repetition) of "into the night," and the darkness from where I borrow my ink. And yes, it's true that I wrote this poem into the night, haha. I wrote the fears of the night, I wrote of my own experiences of the night, albeit minorly changed to make it more, relevant. I also wanted there to be parallels between the character, the reader, and the poet, so that as I write, as the story starts, as the reader reads, we're all in it together. So yes. This is why I wrote what I wrote.

I Don't Love You

I don't love you, I don't love you
My mind numbly chants,
For I have so many reason not to,
But so many to counter them,
So like the blood that returns
After releasing a tight grip
I'm in love with you, still.

I don't know what's wrong with me... lol, with my want of being explicit, yet also being secretive in how I write love.
But the conclusion is obvious, so obvious, it's likely for people to reach the wrong conclusions. ;)