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.

When the sun sinks low,
and the world dissolves into its own dark,
does the shadow mourn the light,
its purpose stolen by the stars?
Or does it slip away unseen,
folding itself into corners
only the forgotten can reach?

Does it dream of being whole—
not the absence of something
but something itself,
a figure unbound
from the body it mimics?

When dawn stretches its golden fingers,
does the shadow flinch,
or does it rise in quiet obedience,
grateful for another day of following,
of existing only as a reflection
of what it can never become?

And when no one is watching,
does the shadow step ahead
just once,
to feel what it’s like
to be?

Seeds, too, were surrounded by darkness
before they became anew—
held close by the quiet earth,
pressed into silence so deep
it swallowed the memory of the sky.

Did they mourn the light they had never known?
Did they fear the weight above them,
or trust the unknowable forces
that buried them so?

And when they split themselves apart,
breaking open to grow,
was it with joy,
or was it pain
that gave way to life?

What, then, of us?

There is an animal beneath the skin,
soft-footed and silent.
It does not howl or claw;
it listens,
ears tuned to the pulse
of roots moving underground.

It does not speak our language,
but it hums to the rhythm
of wind slipping through leaves,
to the measured breath of the ocean
meeting the shore.

When you sit still enough,
you can feel it stir:
a gentle shifting in your chest,
a reminder of what you once knew—
the scent of rain before it falls,
the way the earth holds you
even when you forget its name.

It is patient,
this quiet creature,
its heartbeat slow and steady,
a tether to a time
when nothing needed to be said
to be understood.

But it waits,
not for anger,
not for hunger,
but for the moment
when stillness becomes unbearable—
when the weight of silence cracks
and the soft becomes sharp.

One day, it will claw its way free,
not with violence,
but with certainty,
a slow emergence from the dark.

You will feel it rise,
not as a battle,
but as a birth.
It will stand, uncoiling,
and you will find yourself
on your knees,
pressing your face to the ground,
finally remembering
what it means
to belong.

Into darkness carry fire
when all seems grim, and bleak, and dire,
When shadows loom and hope retreats,
Let not your spirit know defeat,

Through the night, when fears conspire,
Let your heart be a burning pyre,
With every step in the abyss,
Hold fast to dreams, onwards persist,

In storms of sorrow, in waves of pain,
Tend your flame through wind and rain,
When in the dark and facing foes,
Be the light, the torch, the glow,

Though the world may tear and tire,
Keep your spirit ever higher,
Against the tide and through the mire,
Into darkness carry fire.

The mountains keep their secrets well—
in their silence, they bear the grief of stone,
the centuries pressed into stillness,
each stratum a tale of what once was
and what shall ever be.
One looks upon them and thinks,
they have never known what it is to fall.
But does one not hear them groan
beneath the weight of themselves,
the way they shift in the night
like old men turning in their slumber?

Each crack in the rock does whisper
of pressures unseen, tectonics
of ancient sorrows long since stilled.
In this, they are alike to us:
holding fast to the unspoken,
wearing their jagged edges
as though they have no need of gentleness.
But hark—does one hear it?

The way the wind grazes their faces,
how even the stone does yield to that
which is so soft it has no name.

We come to them burdened,
bearing the weight of days
like a sack of heavy stones,
each one a moment believed
to be the end of something vital.

We hold them close, believing
they are all we have—
these small griefs that anchor us
to the ground we tread upon.

But the mountains know
what we have not yet learned—
that every stone shall one day
become dust,
every peak worn smooth
by the selfsame wind
that now does caress the face.
We are not less for this,
nor are we more.

We are but the shape
life has taken to know itself,
to feel, in this brief span,
the vastness of what it means
to be.

Consider this:
the stars, too, shall perish,
and yet their light does wander
the corridors of space,
filling the night long after
they have burned themselves out.
We are no different.
What we are now, in this moment
of small sorrow, shall pass.

It is not the end,
but a whisper in the vastness

of what we are yet to become.
So let the mountains speak to us.

Let them tell how even they
must break and bow to time,
how their strength lies not in
holding firm, but in the slow
unfolding of their edges
to the universe's touch.

We are not small,
nor are we infinite.

We are the echo
of all that has ever been
and all that shall ever be.

Listen, and one shall hear
how the mountains weep
not because they are broken,
but because they are becoming.

                                                  And so are we.

-                                        I've spent so many hours
                                         underneath this sky,
                                                         Lamenting,
        The days between pass by me
         one by one, ah,
         Unrelenting,
                      They've all been the same,
                                       You see,
                Since you left this world behind,
      But I look for you in the starlight,
                    As your voice plays in my mind.

There is a house
on the edge of the world,
where the wind forgets its name.
It does not welcome travelers;
it devours them,
pulling their stories
into the walls,
where they rattle like leaves
trapped in glass jars.

No one built this house.
It grew.
Its beams are the ribs
of something that never learned to die,
its windows open not to air
but to the sighs of lost seasons.
Even the sun’s gaze
glances off its roof,
afraid to linger.

The door isn’t locked,
but it resists touch—
a surface too smooth,
like skin stretched
over something restless beneath.
Still, you knock,
your knuckles trembling
as the sound folds into silence.

Inside, the rooms shift
when you look away.
A hallway grows longer
with each step,
its floorboards breathing softly,
as though the house is inhaling
your unease.
The walls ache with the weight
of unsaid things.

In the center of the house,
there is a room
with no corners,
its shape dissolving
as you try to name it.
Here, the wind gathers.
Not the wind you know—
not the playful breeze
or the feral howl—
but the discarded breaths
of all who came before you.

You see their faces in the wallpaper,
their mouths frozen mid-sentence,
their eyes half-lidded
like clocks stopped
between seconds.
They whisper your name,
though you have not spoken it.

You try to leave,
but the house will not permit it.
It swallows your footsteps,
its floors growing soft
as the wind begins to rise.
It presses into your chest,
pulling at the corners
of your voice,
stealing the words
before they can shape themselves.

And then you know.
The house eats the wind
because the wind carries memory,
and memory tastes of the living.
It feeds on the forgotten,
the untold,
the silences that stretch
between what was
and what will never be.

When you vanish,
as you must,
the house will grow another door,
another room to catch the wind.
Someone else will come.
They always do.

...or at least, I pray, the strength to bear the knowledge."




A lifetime of hardship
        weighs down on my shoulders,

  I've buried my hate,
                             but it keeps getting colder,

Cry out to the heavens, sky's beauty unfurled-
While I commune, here, with Atlas
           beneath the weight of the world.

I once walked the world  
                                           with open arms,  
my hands stretched w  i  d  e like branches.  

a canopy to shelter the lost.  
a refuge for the clumsy and blind.  

But the world pressed too hard,  

                      too often,  

and my leaves tore beneath its careless weight.  

So I became the thorn instead.  
Soft wood splintered,  
                         sap dried  
                                     to amber shields,  
and the shade I offered  
                                           withered.  

Now my arms are briars,  
worn close to my chest,  
                     curled into a hedge  
                                    the foolish do not cross.  

The world is full of stumbling fools,  
        drunken moths crashing into flames  
                      of their own kindling.  

They scorch themselves  
                                         on their own sparks,  
and still, they scream at the fire  
                                    as though it were cruel  
                                    for burning.  

I watch them now  
                       from a quiet distance,  
my roots deep, my bark hardened,  
knowing no vine will wrap around me  
                            without bleeding.  

It is not hatred that keeps me,  

                                              but weariness—  

the wisdom to know  
that the soft are devoured  
                               by the teeth of the indifferent.  

The world does not deserve my kindness.  
It spills its recklessness  
                                 like broken wine,  
drenching the soil in its waste,  
and waits for hands to clean it.  

But I have burned those hands  
                                       to ash and bone.  

Now I walk with thorns in my shadow,  
each step a warning,  
                      each word a needle  
                                         laced with restraint.  

Let the world tear itself apart.  
                       I am no longer here  
                                      to sew its seams.

    The world bites without thinking,
                                   and I will not be chewed.

Water holds no loyalties to memory.  
It will swallow your name whole,  
Churn it into a language  
Only stones can decipher,  
Then spit it out as foam—  
A frothy eulogy  
No one asked for.  

It moves like betrayal dressed in silk,  
Soft to the touch  
But sharp enough to carve bones into weapons.  
Do not mistake its stillness for mercy.  
Even in its quiet,  
It dreams of drowning cities  
And filling lungs with liquid sermons.  

Water does not mourn.  
It erases.  
It is the great unmaker,  
Pulling the faces of lovers,  
The hands of mothers,  
And the footprints of gods  
Into its endless, churning womb.  

I’ve seen it carry grief like a crown,  
Rivers wearing the ashes of cathedrals  
And the charred wood of promises  
As though they were jewels.  
And yet, it forgets.  
It will forget you,  
Just as it forgot the mountains that once knelt to it,  
Just as it forgot the villages  
That tried to tame its chaos.  

Drink from it if you dare.  
It will not quench your thirst;  
It will bloom in your throat,  
A garden of salt and regret,  
Each drop a seed of storms.  

Even the sky cannot hold it.  
When water falls,  
It claws its way back to the earth,  
Filling every crack with its liquid hunger.  
It breaks its mirrors on the surface,  
Each shard a fractured memory  
It refuses to keep.  

It whispers,  
But it never listens.  
You could spill your secrets into it,  
And it would carry them away  
Not as treasures, but as burdens.  
It does not care.  
It has no need for your pain.  

Water is the poet of forgetting,  
Writing its verses on the soft shores of time,  
Then dragging the sand away grain by grain  
Until no trace remains.  
It cannot love you.  
It cannot hate you.  
It only exists to move forward,  
Always forward,  
Toward an ocean that never knew your name.

Beneath the rotted floorboards, time pulses,  
an arterial thrum of root-veined clocks.  
They do not tick for kings, nor bow for breath,  
but coil their echoes deep into the loam,  
dragging splinters of once-wooded oaths  
into the mouths of worms.  

What is time here, but the taste of damp?  
But the drag of green shadows across unblinking stones?  
A language older than lungs,  
a song of split seeds whispering their secrets  
to the weight of a thousand buried steps.  

Above, the weightless still mvoe,  
mistaking hours for thresholds,  
grinding moments into calendars  
as if order were a thing the earth might honor.  
Their laughter carries, thin as copper wire,  
breaking against the stone’s unhurried shrug.  

Here is the truth:  
roots keep the time,  
counting each second by the shade of moss,  
each century by the rise of the hawthorn's spine.  
And we are nothing to it,  
fleeting as the rain on uncarved stone,  
as brittle as the leaves  
crushed under their own arrival.  

I laid my ear to the ground once,  
and the earth opened a crack of sound—  
not a scream, but a swallow,  
a voice neither cruel nor kind.  
It told me this:  

"Do not fret your passing.  
Even your dust will kneel  
and grow itself into shadows.  
The clock of roots will claim you too,  
a heartbeat winding down  
to something soft and green."

I tried to write you down,  
to cage your shape in syllables  
and carve your voice into stone—  
but you fell through the spaces between the words,  
your presence an ache I could not name.  

You were the shadow  
cast by light too bright to see,  
the ripple left by a hand  
reaching for water but finding air.  

I am tethered to what is not,  
chasing the echo of an echo,  
a whisper that refuses to rest.  
You linger where thought dissolves,  
where memory curls in on itself,  
a Möbius of longing.  

If I could grasp you,  
trace the edges of your form,  
I would not.  
You are not meant to be held,  
only felt in the hollow  
you carved into my being.  

And when I speak your name,  
it splinters—  
a sound too heavy for breath,  
too light to fall.

In the quiet corners of my mind,  
Whispers of love and loss entwined.  
A heart that beats with silent screams,  
Chasing shadows in fractured dreams,

Eyes that see but seldom show,  
The battles fought, the undertow.  
A smile that masks the storm inside,  
Where fears and hopes in darkness bide,

Yet in this maze of tangled thought,  
A flicker of light, a lesson taught.  
That even in the deepest night,  
The soul can find its way to light,

So here I stand, a paradox,  
A fragile heart, a sturdy ox.  
Embracing all that I’ve become,  
A symphony of all and none.

A spider crosses my path,
its steps careful, calculated.
It pauses in my shadow,
uncertain whether to move forward or back.
We share this moment, the spider and I,
both caught in the web we did not choose,
each bound by the rules of our nature.

I do not crush it,
knowing there is no triumph in such an act.
But I understand, too,
that this same spider would show no kindness
to a fly ensnared in its silk.
And that is okay.
We all follow the scripts we are given,
finding our place in a world
that is neither cruel nor kind,
just indifferent.

We part ways, the spider and I,
it continuing its silent journey,
and I, mine.
In this fleeting intersection of our lives,
there is no victory or defeat,
only existence and its quiet persistence.

And as I watch it disappear into the grass,
the day carries on,
but the spider lingers in my thoughts,
a tiny presence that feels larger than it should.
It reminds me of the countless lives
we pass by each day, unnoticed,
each with their own silent battles,
each following the threads of fate
that weave us all into this tapestry.

I think about the webs we spin,
invisible to the eyes of others,
and how often we find ourselves
trapped in the strands of our own making.
How many times have I, too,
hesitated in someone’s shadow,
uncertain of the path ahead,
wondering if I should move forward
or retreat into the safety of the familiar?

And yet, like the spider,
we press on, driven by something
deeper than thought,
some primal urge to survive,
to persist despite the odds.
There is a strange beauty in this,
a quiet resilience that speaks
to the core of what it means to be alive.

Perhaps, in the end,
it is enough to simply exist,
to find our place in the world
not through grand gestures or triumphs,
but through the small mercies we offer,
even to those who cannot fathom them.
If I can shape the world,
if only for a moment,
into something resembling kindness,
then perhaps the indifference
is not as vast as it seems.

The clock exhales a trembling breath,
its pulse a shiver in the spine of time.
I wait,
unmoored in the ebb of minutes,
where silence holds the marrow of the night
and shadows braid themselves with longing.

The moon hangs, not as a goddess,
but as a seamstress,
stitching the veil of night with frayed intentions.
Each star—a pinprick in the fabric,
leaking a light too distant to warm.

I have heard the hymn of the ivy,
creeping on stone,
its whisper a litany of slow conquests,
its green, a defiance of winter’s gray.
And I wonder—
who will sing for me when my roots no longer hold?

Beneath my skin, rivers stall.
What was once a tempest
is now the measured drip
of something no longer daring to spill.
There is a violence in stillness,
in the way silence sharpens itself against my thoughts.

But let me tell you—
in the shadow of this unraveling,
I have made my peace
with the slow decay of mirrors,
with the fracturing of names.
The sparrow need not call itself a sparrow
to fly.

And when the end comes—
(oh, it is coming)
it will not be the roar of oceans folding into themselves,
nor the shattering of celestial harps.
It will be the sound
of a match extinguished in water,
the faint hiss
of something small,
forgotten,
forever.

...𝑰𝑻 𝑭𝑰𝑳𝑳𝑺 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑯𝑶𝑳𝑳𝑶𝑾 𝑷𝑳𝑨𝑪𝑬𝑺




Your fingers traced the edge of my jaw,
and I could feel the galaxies ripple beneath your touch.

We exist in fragments—pieces of memories we never spoke aloud.

I think we’ve both been running too long,
chasing echoes that dissolve before they’re fully formed.

But there’s something divine in the way you linger,
like a prayer unfinished, a truth unspoken.

I let you in, just far enough to feel the pull of your ache.

We are nothing more than ghosts in each other’s veins,

but god, how real it feels


when your hand finds mine in the dark.

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.

Body aches, and soul decays, the ocean stretches wide,
With scorching skies, and burning eyes, I’ve nowhere left to hide,
No wind to kiss these ragged sails, no stars to be my guide,
I drift in silence, hours bleed, the waves and I collide,

The sun, a hammer, beats me down, each breath a broken plea,
The thirst has left my throat a grave, the hunger gnaws at me,
The years, the months, the days are one, the tides my only sea,
Yet still, I wait—though hope is dust—for solace that won’t be,

No whispering wind, no shade in sight, no shadows on the crest,
The horizon mocks me with its calm, my heartbeat begs for rest,
A desert made of salted glass, the end a welcome guest,
I’m lost, I’m worn, I’ve come to know the drowning in my chest,

If these dead waters rise for me, I’ll sink without a sound,
Let ocean’s weight press down my bones, ‘til none of me is found,
For I have nothing left to give, no strength left to be crowned,
And if these seas shall swallow whole, then let me, too, be drowned.

In the quiet, slowly stirring,
Through the night, the dark alluring,
Came a breath, a soft recurring,
Like a sigh upon the air,

Through the woods, the shadows leaning,
Every thought within me gleaning,
Past regrets, now intervening,
Held me captive in despair,

In the stillness, something shifting,
Through the gloom, my fears were lifting,
As if fate, forever drifting,
Led me onward, unaware,

Neither sound nor sight deceiving,
But a sense, a deeper weaving,
Like a thread of truth, believing,
Guided me without a care,

Through the trees, a pathway glowing,
In the dark, a river flowing,
And my steps, now steady, showing,
That the night could not impair,

Yet the breeze, with whispers fleeting,
Told of days beyond our meeting,
Of a time when your heart's beating,
In a world that's bright and fair,

So I walked then, deeply grieving,
From the night, my doubts were leaving,
And the dawn, with light retrieving,
Showed me skies beyond compare,

In the east, the colors blending,
With the dawn, the night was ending,
And the sun, with rays ascending,
Promised hope within its glare,

Yet I knew, beneath this yearning,
As the light was slowly turning,
That the dark, forever churning,
Would return, its grip to share,

For the shadows, always creeping,
In the corners, ever sleeping,
Wait for moments, silent, keeping,
To reclaim what light can't bear,

So though morning breaks, still tender,
In my heart, I can't surrender,
For the night, in all its splendor,
Waits to catch me in its snare.

I don't want to live forever,
I don't want to be flattered,
I don't want the world to know
that I was here and that I mattered,
I don't want any wealth,
I don't want the baubles that it buys,
I don't care if the sun is setting
or if it's morning on the rise,
I don't crave your fleeting fame
Nor the glory that you chase,
I'll not be trapped in moments,
I'll be set apart, no trace,
I do not seek a peaceful life,
I wish not to be "free,"
I want to be as fathomed
and as forgiving as the sea