The sky bruises at the edges
violet veins bursting through the silence
like old wounds speaking.
Not blood, but memory
spilled across the firmament.

Distance is a color,
you just never noticed.
It hums in plum shadows on her cheek,
in amethyst regrets curled in the corners of old letters,
in the sigh of a cigarette smoke ghosting
toward someone who isn't there.

Color makes the world turn
not gravity, not time,
but the way rust stains a prayer on an iron gate,
how saffron screams from a monk’s robe
while the lavender dusk swallows the sun whole
without apology.

But black
black is something else.
It doesn’t turn.
It doesn’t beg.
It absorbs.

It’s the silence
between stars.
The unspoken between lovers.
The last thing your father’s eyes held
before he sank.

And violet
that hesitant echo of black
is distance turning its head away
just before the goodbye.

I loved you when I shouldn't have.
Didn’t plan to—never intended—
you were good enough
for those
blunt-edged
Tuesdays and
broken-glass Thursdays
you know,
those days you said
“Can you come over?”
and I
stupidly
always said
“Sure.”
(What’s my name?)
Not yours.
Never yours.

I didn’t want to fall,
but I did.
Even while we were
tangled in
half-closed lies and
barely buried truths.
It’s funny
how we ache for the poison
that already lives in our veins.
How I saw
from the start
we were chemicals
unstable,
volatile,
clinging to a rusted shelf
waiting to break.

I was strong.
You were sinking.
You dragged me down
while I taught you to rise.
I showed you
how to see.
But it was never
my job
to make you
a ******* lighthouse.

And that
that was where
I ******* lost it.

I should’ve stuck to the plan:
2 hours of escape,
3 hours of noise,
no more.
Tuesdays.
Thursdays.
Send you home
to your shadow world.
But no.
I carried you
into music,
into meaning,
into books that bled your name
on every page.
You said forever.
I said
nothing is.

And still
you walked.
You left.
But not a ******* day goes by
where my name
doesn’t haunt
your spine
like a ghost.

We were more
than you’ll ever know.
More than I’ll ever find again.
But I’ve made
friends
with silence.
I’ve married the ache,
swallowed the ending,
stitched it
into the back of my ribs.

You say you left
to find yourself.
*******.
You found yourself
in my hands.
And you wanted
to show the ones who broke you
how tall you stood.
But you forgot
who taught you to walk.

The cost
was everything.
And you?
You walk easy
because you were handed it all.
Took it.
Wore it.
Forgot it.

I wasn’t perfect
but with me,
you were real.
You were raw.
And now?
You hide.
You live a ******* lie,
afraid of being touched
by anything true again.
Because you know who you are.
You tasted truth.
And now you rot
in its shadow.

Do the crows in your skull
peck memories into migraines?
Do you flinch
at the echo of “us”?
I don’t mind.

I walk.
Alone.
With that little fluffy gift.
Not crying.
Not reaching.
Not breaking.
Not needing.
If I had one more day
fine.
If I had a hundred years
fine.
Because none of them
include
you.

You,
who swallowed me
from the inside.

Tree on the Hill
It doesn’t grow
it remembers upward,
each branch a green-tinged scream
curved into the ache of sun.

Leaves don’t fall
they betray,
drifting like forgotten tongues
gold-lipped,
summer-sick,
too heavy to lie still.

The bark
creased like an elder’s laughter
etched in dirtscript,
smells of storms caught mid-prayer
and mosses that whisper
to no one in particular.

Its roots?
They grip the hill
like a jealous god,
fingers buried in the soil’s old heartbreak,
sipping secrets from beneath the grassline.

And the wind
it doesn’t pass.
It negotiates.
Swirls between the limbs like lost voices
asking the tree if it's still waiting,
still listening,
still pretending to be alive.

Sparkless grit
presses under frostbit knuckles
not fire,
just the idea of heat
with its eyes shut.

I rest in the draftwork
of holding patterns,
where clocks twitch
but never commit.

Once
weather scored graffiti
down my backframe,
like a vandal too polite
to leave a name.
Now breath limps
blurred,
rattling through cracked syllables
that don’t know what they’re naming.

Tannin hums behind the teeth,
coiled like a riddle
no tongue can unwrap.

Velvet cords grip the throat
not tightly,
just enough
to remind me
I'm still leased
to something unseen.

The wind tastes like rusted lemon
split skin,
unbitten seconds,
ticking in citrus static.

I’m a jar
glaze peeled,
rim chipped,
still ringing
from hands that shaped and fled.

Then comes not-morning
just the choreographed blur
of cloth and chrome,
rituals that shine
but don’t touch.

Time turns its crank.
I nod.
I click.
I vanish for the hours.

And the dark?
It unbuttons itself
with fluent decay.
It wades in,
speaks in steam,
and folds me into its absence
not to ****,
but to remember me
the way embers remember
what they could have burned.

I wait
for endlessness,
or whatever arrives
five seconds too late

Somedays I rise like a monk,
barefoot, benign
& still get gutpunched by a cold kettle,
no sugar,
no spoons,
no ******* coffee
just the bitter truth of unplanned idiocy.

That’s the prelude.

Then comes the uninvited opera
the ogre in a hatchback
slithering through lanes he didn’t earn,
gargling ego, honking for clearance
like his tardiness
was my crucifix to bear.

The shop-witch counts coins
copper by copper,
dragging eternity across the till
while I rot behind her,
watching her smirk at the math
like she's curing cancer.

I light a smoke
wind turns assassin.
My sandwich?
Now a Sahara-dusted tragedy.
A mouthful of grit.
Sky ****** spite.
I take a drag—wet ash,
storm on my lips.

There’s always
something.

A misfired message
“you up?”
No, ****, I’m spiraling.
A call about their cat's vomiting,
as if I’m the feline whisperer.
And why is it
that the needy
find me when I need
no one?

Some ***** unclips their door
into my car,
nods like they did me a favour
like my paintwork
was begging for a scratch.
No apology. Just audacity.

And then
relationships, appointments,
all these temporal collisions
some can’t ******,
some can’t stop.
It’s always
either waiting,
or sprinting to keep up
while someone else
finishes without you,
wipes off their guilt
& says,
“ready to go again?”

Somedays…
it’s more days than not.

The inconsiderate breed like roaches
everywhere,
invisible
until they nibble at the nerves.
Each one
a subtle saboteur of serenity
a Harry,
a Sally,
a gnat in the gut of grace.

And I
I dream of vaporizing silence,
a death-ray of solitude
or **** it,
just vanishing,
****,
if that’s what it takes
to bypass this
imposed ritual of irritation.

I pray:
“Lord, get me through this day.”
But perhaps
I should say:
“Lord, muzzle the world.
And let me sip
my ******* coffee
in peace.”

Somedays,
I just want calm.
But somedays…
are all days
in drag.

The river
— still —
not dead,
just holding its breath like it’s been doing for centuries,
like me,
warm-skinned, waiting,
a vein of old gods slicing the belly of the land.

Light drips
thick, slow
like honey from a wound,
slick across willow bones,
and dusk swallows it
without a sound.

Crickets scratch
violins made of rust and dirt,
screaming lullabies for the lost.
Each note
a tooth pulled from the silence,
buried beneath the reeds.

Maple leaves
curl like fists,
anger in amber,
whispers of fire choking the wind—
they’ve seen too many falls,
too many barefoot ghosts
asking the trees for answers they never give.

Bridges bend
like old men
too tired to hold stories anymore—
but they do.
They do.
Their backs cracked with the weight of kisses,
of “forever”s spit through clenched teeth,
wood soaked in the sweat of holding on.

Sun bleeds out
slow
gold leaking into black,
into arms that forgot how to hold anything but
absence.

And the river just keeps
keeps.
Keeps.

Still.
Silent.
A throat never cut
but always open.
Waiting for the moon
to swallow it whole
and call it peace.

The moon
pale, round, soft buttered crust,
spills gold over apple-skin grass,
whole and warm the hush of dusk.

Night birds drift,
weightless ink,
brushing the sky with feathered sighs,
folding themselves into silhouette dreams.

Olive fields hum,
rustling evening’s breath,
leaves whispering secrets to the wind,
soft earth cradling the roots of time.

Ladders lean
old embrace,
tracing the spine of the sturdy trunk,
where children once climbed,
their laughter spun into bark—
a lullaby left behind.

Noon melts,
slow honey,
sinking sweetly in waiting arms,

while the moon watches,
                quiet, whole,
                        a silver lantern hung in sleep’s embrace.