amber haze curled through the velvet night
as your username lit my screen.
i checked the clock twice,
dust motes drifting like yesterday’s whispered mistakes
through the still, silent air,
as your name fell from your lips.
for two months, i lived in awe,
hearing her voice across the distance.
you cured my solitude
with every fervent, lingering sermon:
monday: life;
tuesday: art;
rest of the week: meaning;
sunday: the men.
grunge lullaby
we as the sundays,
nodding to nirvana,
your voice, river silt,
a dress of dusk and care
that cloaked and warmed,
even as it clasped and caged me in.
you hid every theory:
a flicker cloaked in shadow,
cool even when everything burned.
white lady, my chosen haze:
sacrament of loss,
covered with shame that screamed in the mirror.
after those years,
i kept nothing:
no messages, no photos;
just the anorexic line of your jawbone
etched in memory,
lest truth wound me deeper.
on deadline nights,
i heard your whisper:
boys are too naive to buy the gown.
i can’t recall if you had
two eyes or ten:
you saw everything,
absorbed everything,
etched in the pale, pulsing glow of the screen,
the timestamp flickering, fragile and faint.
i promised myself you:
your portrait etched in memory.
i can’t redraw it now.
all the times i spoke of angles:
you unraveled dimensions i hadn’t seen,
always ahead of our time.
after two years of proximity, i retreated,
my anxiety encroaching like gathering storm clouds,
and never called again.
you stayed, folding your silence
into small corners of light.
the cure was the sickness, and i knew it.
when you think, don’t think
i was haunted
by the fact you never met me in flesh.
hum the quiet life gently,
with all your wind‑touched cats.
i pray you, under a full moon,
find your new soulmate: someone who stays.
unlike the sanyasi,
the role i never managed to quit,
unlike me:
casting off home and tether;
walking into the endless horizon;
barefoot in wind and dust;
nothing carried but s h a d o w and a s h.
