The world does not stop.  
Its hands grind the hours to dust,  
indifferent, relentless,  
a machine that tears beauty from its roots.  

They pave over wildness,  
turn green to gray,  
and laugh as they vanish into cities  
built to collapse.  

And I hate them for it—  
for the way they pass by  
what remains,  
too blind to see the tender rebellion  
of a wildflower rising through cracked stone,  
the stillness of a hill beneath an endless sky.  

At fifty-five miles per hour,  
they reduce the infinite to a blur,  
a place they will never touch.  

But I love the quiet, the overlooked.  
The way moss clings to damp stone,  
the faint pulse of water through soil,  
the hum of life in a field mouse’s frantic dash.  

A single blade of grass,  
standing unbroken beneath the frost,  
carries more grace than the world  
they call progress.  

For I, too, am a speck of dust,  
being ground down by causality,  
spun within the great indifference  
of all that moves and does not see.  

And yet I persist—  
a small thing against the weight,  
an ember clutching at its warmth,  
a whisper in the deafening void.  

I want to scream,  
not to stop the world,  
but to make them see.  
To make them hear the voice of moss,  
the whisper of grass,  
the soft rebellion of the unnoticed.  

I want them to kneel  
and lay their palms to the ground,  
to feel what still endures beneath them—  
not in grandeur,  
but in the quiet things  
that will outlast their noise.  

Let them say I was hollow.  
Let them call me bitter, or ruined.  
But let them know this:  
Every fragile thing that stood defiant  
held a piece of me within it,  
a weight to steady its roots,  
a breath to fan its fire.  

And when they forget,  
as they always will,  
I will remain in the places they passed,  
small and unseen,  
but unbroken.

'It'll be alright, though, won't it?

   Despite this tightness in my chest?'

(And yet,)

    Each of these moments

                                                  S

                                                   P

                                                  I

                                               L

                                                  L

                                                S

                                  direct into the next,

            'My life is so kinetic,'
         how have I this long kept my head?

        Although 'this hope may be synthetic,'

                      I think it still beats being dead

This latter stage of life unfolds—  
so distant now from dreams once gold.  
Each sunset sinks, each storm is crossed,  
and whispers still of Loved and Lost.  

The days ahead, though yet unwritten,  
hold no warmth, no solace given.  
I stand beneath the waning sun,  
and find no comfort—  
there is none.

I tried to build a world from quiet moments—  
small, whispered things that barely held their shape.  
But everything ran together,  
blurred like wet ink on skin,  
and I stopped knowing where it started,  
or when it stopped being mine.  

You once asked me what it felt like  
to carry the weight of so much.  
I said it wasn’t heavy—just scattered,  
like leaves caught in the wind,  
never settling, never landing  
where I thought they would.  

But somewhere in the chaos,  
I found stillness,  
a soft gravity that kept pulling me back,  
not to the things I’d lost,  
but to the things that stayed,  
the ones that never needed names.  

There’s a pull to what we don’t say,  
and maybe that’s where the truth rests.  
Not in the grasping, not in the struggle,  
but in the letting go—  
in the acceptance  
that some things are meant to drift,  
to settle in places we never thought to look.  

The edges of this world I’ve made are still rough,  
but now, they feel right.  
I’ve found peace in their sharpness,  
in the way they’ve held together despite the breaking.  
Even the void, it turns out,  
has a sweetness  
when you stop trying to fill it.