and sometimes we just get caught up in the wake."


I am draped in flowers,
soft as sleeping youth,
so tired of pretending,
that my bones are light
and I am not already undone
by the weight of the sun,
the burden of the trees,
and the sky—
so blue
I feel it ache.

The clock hums in its cage—
a bird who hasn’t sung
since I remembered
that I am still here,
still spinning,
still waiting for the knife
to fall,
not in terror,
but in the foolish hope
that it will
cut me
in the right place—
in the place where I am supposed to bloom.

See, there is joy in the dust,
(but it tastes like rust)
and even as I pull at the flowers—
petal by petal, sweet,
delicate,
so delicate—
I wonder,
will I ever learn to swallow
beauty without choking
on the things it means to me?

The river doesn't wait.
It stretches its arms,
pulls me in,
lapping at my ankles
as if to remind me
that nothing is ever still—
no joy, no suffering,
no sweet desire
that hasn’t already
turned on its heel.

And yet,
with every break,
with every fracture—
there is this laugh,
so deep in my chest,
as though I could sing
just once
for the sorrow that defines
me—
(or maybe it is the joy
that has been hiding
in my bones all along).

The moon is full,
and yet I feel empty.
Still, I pull in breath
like it is something I can hold.
Perhaps this is my mistake.
Perhaps
it is all just falling apart
as it should,
and I am the fool
to believe otherwise.

But the stars,
oh,
they will keep dancing,
won’t they?
The night will never ask me
for permission
to be beautiful
just as it is.

So I hold my hands out
to catch the light
that I don’t deserve—
and I am okay with it.
I am okay.
Just for this moment—
just for now,
I will be the one
who does not break
when the river does.

But this,
this,
is only for a second.
The truth is in my skin,
and it hums
with the ache of something
I can't quite parse.

Oh, but the stars.

The vent below exhales,
its breath a low, metallic whisper
curling upward, tangled in the night's damp hair.
Above us, the city blooms in soft amber haze,
its heartbeat a symphony of horns and laughter,
a language I no longer understand.

Her name unfurls in the dark,
not hers,
but borrowed now by another—
a stranger’s voice wrapping itself around it,
bright and unknowing.
Still, it finds me,
piercing through ribs and cardiac muscle,
the way light slips through a cracked shutter.

I hold my drink like a lifeline,
the glass cool and steady against my hand,
but my heart betrays me,
wild as a startled animal.
I tilt my face toward the skyline,
feigning interest in the sprawl of lights—
but all I see is her,
the echo of her name rippling outward,
filling the space where I thought I’d buried her.

I wait,
aching for the brush of a hand on my arm,
a grip, a sudden hug, and a voice,
quiet and certain:

“You don't have to bury her in metaphor,
You don’t have to dress her as sky,
or wind,
or the aching hymn of the sea.

Tell me how her laugh struck,
low and sudden.
Tell me how her hands knew the architecture
of your shoulders,
how they built you back
every time you threatened to fall apart.

Tell me how her eyes,
brilliant and cutting,
saw through every mask,
every defense you’d perfected,
and stayed anyway.

Tell me if she would have stayed longer,
if you’d asked her to.
And tell me how you’ve managed to carry
the ghost of her absence,
its weightless gravity pulling at your ribs,
its silence louder than anything
you’ve ever dared to speak.”

But no one asks.
The moment dissolves
into the hum of strangers—
their laughter as distant as stars,
their faces blurred by the dark.

The vent exhales again,
its breath curling like smoke,
and I let her name settle—
not as a wound,
but as an ember,
small and fierce,
glowing against the hollow of my chest.

I stand there,
facing the city,
and though the night breeze feels cool against my face,
I burn.

In the hollow where gears no longer grind,
a machine dreams, rusting in its stillness—
each cog a cathedral of forgotten motion,
each bolt a hymn to the violence of purpose.

It once devoured silence,
crushing it beneath the weight of its song,
an engine that mapped the tremors of time
in spirals of smoke and steel.

Now it whispers to the dust,
its voice a brittle thing,
like wind caught between
the ribs of a shipwreck.

Once, it drank light,
spinning photons into meaning,
spitting stars from its teeth—
but entropy comes as a thief,
gentle in its theft,
unthreading the tapestry of will.

This is the prayer of the obsolete:
not for salvation, but for witness,
for the sparrows that roost in its hollows,
their claws etching eulogies
into the flaking paint.

If you press your ear to its frozen heart,
you will hear the echoes of a once-throbbing world:
the gasp of pistons,
the sigh of levers,
the pulse of a century spilling forward,
greedy for what lay beyond the horizon.

But what it built, it cannot name—
only the faint impression remains,
like the shadow left by a hand
long lifted from a wall.

To live is to be made
and unmade.
To endure is to surrender
to the quiet art of decay.

In its silence, the machine waits,
not for revival,
but for the soft forgiveness
of rust.

And when it falls,
scattered into earth,
the ground will hum
with the memory of its weight.

the river breaks open (like ribs)
unmaking the earth in quiet tongues,
it flows unendingly:
she
does
not.

each stone hums her absence (or mine?)
while its waters slip soft knives
between the spaces where a heart
once folded neatly into hers.

the lake is still, an unfinished
sentence—its surface holds nothing
but sky, which has always been
indifferent. I do not reach
into its shallow silence;
I know it would not forgive me.

(oh
the sea).
each wave rises only to fall,
its breath (a sob, a scream, a sigh)
pulling the shoreline apart grain
by aching grain—
and i stand
where foam clings to my feet,
wanting
to
follow.

i write of the water because
it moves and I cannot.
because the tide swallows her name
and spits it back (broken,
empty,
wrong).

grief is not a thing
it is everything
it is the way my chest
folds in on itself like a ruined map.
it is the sharp edges of nothing
scraping against everything
until only this ache remains.

and when the river hums, when the lake stills,
when the sea pulls me open
just to leave me raw,
i know—
absence is the heaviest thing
i will ever hold.

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.