In the temple of unspoken mornings,
a door swings, not ajar but wide—
its hinges weep, long unkissed by oil,
long bent by winds that come from
nowhere.

Do you feel it, too? The way the air
clutches its throat, as though words
have gathered there in clumps of
breathless apology?

This is how time unravels:
slowly, like wet silk pulled
too hard through the eye of a needle.
It frays at the edges, whispers
of all the threads we never wove.

The earth remembers us only as echoes.
Fingers pressed once into
its forgiving skin—
a palmprint gone before
it understands its shape.

Once, I dreamed of rivers:
not the sharp-edged kind
that cut their way through stone,
but rivers made of shadows,
of choices we left behind
to drown.

And what are we,
but the sum of our silences?
The rooms we entered
and left untouched?

I stand here now,
on the lip of the great dark,
and the stars—oh,
the stars—
bend low to meet me.

I wonder if they, too,
are waiting for
a voice that doesn’t
break
when it speaks.

The threshold murmurs underfoot,
a breath of welcome,
or warning, or both.
This is the place where endings
begin—
where even the smallest light
is an earthquake
in the soul.

From stellar cores where chaos writ,
I formed in fusion’s blinding pyre,
A relic of the infinite,
Forged deep within a cosmic fire,

Ejected forth by death’s collapse,
A supernova’s final breath,
Through voids I danced in endless lapse,
A mote of life within its death,

The cradle of a newborn world
Ensnares me in its molten womb,
Where under continents, I’m hurled,
Entombed within the planet’s gloom,

Millennia grind my prison thin,
Till human hands my chains unbind,
In forge’s roar, they mold my skin,
Their tools to shape both steel and mind,

A plow to carve the yielding loam,
A blade to cleave, a shield to bear,
A bridge to guide the weary home,
A rail to span the open air,

Yet even iron bends to time,
Corrosion whispers through its veins,
Its once-bright strength succumbs to grime,
Returning dust to earth’s domains,

But iron’s tale can never end,
For stars await their ancient kin,
To forge anew, to break, to mend,
A cosmic cycle, born again.

Somewhere, in a field of static snow,
a violin lies unplayed,
its strings breathing the hushed tension
of storms caught between clouds.
The bow, discarded, angles like a broken wing
bent under a sky so gravid with noise
it forgets to weep.

Each string hums an unspoken question:
Why does silence gather such gravity?
The wood remembers a hand
that carved hymns from the void,
its grain bearing witness
to the weight of creation.

I watch from afar,
a shadow swallowed by dusk,
where soundless specters rise
from the soil's yawning absence.
Their mouths are mirrors,
reflecting only the things
we dare not say aloud.

Once, I held the bow myself,
my breath the metronome of eternity.
Each note spilled from my trembling hands
like the lifeblood of gods
we did not mean to summon.
Their voices still echo,
fragile filigrees caught
in the harp of my ribs.

Now, even my shadow refuses me.
The light fractures around it,
falling into the fissures
between longing and despair.
Still, the violin waits,
its patience the only hymn
worth singing.

I bend to pick it up—
the silence shatters.
Each shard catches the light,
spinning a constellation
of unplayed songs.

And in the final note,
a blade of sound cuts through me,
splitting marrow from bone,
memory from dream.
The echo hangs like a question
only the dead might answer,
and I am left to wonder
if it was ever meant to be played at all.

12/3/22

When snow drapes the world,
I hear the echo of wings,
their flight a melody
I can no longer touch.

When the air fills with song,
I see the quiet fall of white,
its silence a ghost
pressed into memory.

I am always leaning—
toward what was,
what might be,
what should have been.

The moment,
no matter how it gleams,
slips through my hands
like water,
like wind.

---

12/5/24

Perhaps this is why I gather fragments,
why the glint of frost on a blade of grass
holds my gaze longer than the expanse of snow.
Why I follow the tilt of a bird’s head,
its small movements louder than the sky.

The whole of any moment
is too vast, too sharp—
a cacophony of light and sound
I cannot hold.

But in the minutia,
I find a silence I can bear,
a single thread
to keep my mind from unraveling.

Perhaps this is how I survive the present:
by breaking it into pieces

small enough to love, maybe,


small enough to leave.

The fossils hold no names,
no mourners to cradle their edges,
no elegies to weave their flight into memory.
And yet, they linger,
etched stubbornly into the earth’s spine,
defiant in their refusal to disappear.

The soil sings softly for them to yield,
to smooth their edges,
to fold into the quiet churn of becoming.
But they cling—
not to life,
but to the shape of it,
the weight of what they once were
locked in stone that pretends
it is still bone.

I press my hand to the ground,
feel the echo of their resistance,
and I know them,
for I too am a creature
carrying what time has asked me to release.
I too grip the brittle edges
of what is no longer,
keeping its form
even as it threatens to break me.

We are kin in this rebellion,
this quiet mutiny against forgetting.
Not because the world remembers us,
but because we remember it—
the curve of what was,
the ache of its passing,
the shape of a weight
that cannot be returned.


                     Not alive.


           Not gone.

                                    Only refusing to let go.

I draw maps on the inside of my skin,  
inked in the color of vanishing.  
Here lies the boundary of what was ours,  
eroded by the tide of unspoken.  
The compass spins, untethered,  
its needle trembling toward absence.  

Do you hear the silence?  
It is not quiet—  
it claws at the air,  
each gasp a hymn to what’s been torn.  
The walls hum with the echoes of us,  
a dissonant symphony,  
the architecture of breaking.  

You left your shadow folded neatly,  
tucked in the corner of my ribcage.  
I wear it like a second heart,  
beating out of time,  
a phantom rhythm that sways  
to the cadence of your departure.  

The sky is a wound tonight,  
its dark edges stitched with stars,  
each pinprick of light  
a question I can’t stop asking.  
The moon doesn’t answer,  
its face turned away,  
familiar as grief, distant as god.  

And what of the map I made for you?  
You’ve burned it—  
I smell the ashes in my dreams,  
see the charred remains in the curve of my palm.  
Still, my fingers trace the routes,  
as if I might find you  
in the spaces between now and never,  
as if I might follow the lines  
to the horizon where
You  
and this world  
could have coexisted.

Why are you here?
Hiding in the stolen moments,
The glances of left and right,
Just behind my eye’s corner

Your love is still felt
Brushed against my fingers
When I reach for anything
Like feathers on silk

You haunt me,
A ghost of memories,
Of our little time together.
How are you still alive?