I do not walk alone
I drift,
something watches in the still,
a breath caught in curtains,
a pulse misplaced
in plaster and dust.

The dark is not a void.
It watches.
And waits.

Sometimes,
when I reach for the light,
I swear it leans closer
It touches me
breath on my neck,
skin prickling like wire.

Do you ever hesitate?
That single moment,
when you glance
toward the corner of your room
and your chest locks,
because something
might be
watching?

Not there.
But close.

Not seen.
But still
seeing.

I do not believe in ghosts
demons maybe a different story
but something knows my name
in a voice made of cold.
I hear it sometimes,
when I move too fast
or breathe too loud.

The shadows aren’t still.
They twitch.
They blink.
They wait for me
to turn my back.

There’s a weight behind me
when I’m alone.
A tension
like eyes trained
on the center of my spine,
waiting for me to crack
like an old floorboard.

You can laugh.
You can say it’s all in the mind.
But my mind has rooms
I don’t walk through anymore.
Not in the dark.

And fear
isn't a child’s story.
It's a hand.
Pressed softly
on the back of your head
when no one else is home.

In my quiet mind,
no secrets, no need to lie
only time stares back.

Lonely clock unwinds,
each thought echoes with silence
no one waits inside.

I run in your mind,
looping like a whispered name
you can’t let me go.

But where do we meet
between your dreaming of me
and my fading self?

Just because
I speak of marble
doesn’t mean
Michelangelo whispers in my wrist.

Just because
I name fire
doesn’t mean I stole it
from Prometheus’ ashtray.

I said David
but not yours.
I said God
but not the one
in your tidy chapel of restraint.

Excuse me
if I seem offended
but our poetry
is nothing alike.

You bask in the religion of restraint,
while I
build cathedrals
from collapse.

You drink from Zen porcelain,
cool and pale.
I sip lava
and call it communion.

Your gods are lowercase and quiet.
Mine arrive
wild-haired,
bleeding bronze
and speaking in tongues.

Just because I breathe
where you’ve once stood
doesn’t mean I’m standing for you.
Art is not a deed,
and thought has no landlord.

Yes, I say Nietzsche
but I carry him differently.
Where you saw a hammer,
I saw the shattered sky
and wrote the thunder.

Yes, I echo Rilke
but where you chased the angel,
I let it break my body
and sleep inside.

Do you claim Rodin
every time a figure bends?
Does Giacometti live
in every stretched grief?

Let’s not confuse
the use of a word
with the theft of a soul.

I am not imitating.
I am incarnating.

Let me build my riot
while you tend your minimalist view
then call it everything else,
Let me drench the stanza
while you count your syllables.

Form is not crime.
Expression is not excess.

I wasn’t made for clean glass galleries.
I am basement smoke
and bombed-out breath.
I am oil and gold leaf
on wood that won’t stop splintering.

So keep your calm.
Your precision.
Your borders and white space.

I will keep my howl.
My dripping paint.
My blood-wet diction
and firelit silhouettes.

We are not alike.
We never were.

And if I ever wear
the same word as you
know this:
I embroidered it
in the dark,
with my teeth,
while you were busy
measuring margins
looking for similarities
in mild abstraction.

And now you arrive
not with fanfare,
but as thunder held in the finest silk,
a hush so loud the clouds kneel.

You walk,
and the world answers
the earth flowering in your delicate shadow,
as if even dirt remembers
the scent of goddesses.

The wild rose holds no beauty,
no scent that can be compared.

You are the sun rising through cathedral glass,
stained with wildflower tones:
blue forget me nots,
turmeric yellows,
wine-dark crimsons,
lavender bruises that hold the hush of evening.

Your skin
oh, your skin
a canvas Van Gogh might have dreamed in fever
trembling with each stroke,
sun-drunk wheat gold,
laced with dusk-heat rose,
lit from within
like a lantern floating on an endless lake.

Your eyes
each a Monet morning,
mist-swaddled and shimmering,
like rare symphonies soaked in rainlight,
flickering like cello strings
plucked beneath gleaming starlight.

I hear you
in the hush between wind gusts,
the low hum of honeybees blessing a bloom,
in the breath of river reeds
bending to your passing
like sacred monks in prayer.

You are a madrigal sung in falling water,
the harp hidden in riverbeds
a sound no recording could capture.
Only ripples
know your frequency.

Your presence is an orchestra of moments:
the aria of mountain dawns,
the lullaby of petals torn by breeze
falling softly to the earth,
the rhythm of a thousand painted suns
in the belly of a Kandinsky dream.

I close my eyes
your laugh,
the clatter of silver in a velvet room,
a storm behind stained-glass windows,
a jazz note improvised mid-heaven.

I try to describe you,
but language buckles.
What metaphor for skin that smells like memory?
For eyes that hold entire equinoxes?

Shall I create words
only I understand
syllables that tremble,
tones that shake the earth
just to explain your undescribable beauty?

You are not one flower.
You are every bloom in disobedience
the fire-throated hibiscus,
the shy hellebore,
the rogue jasmine
that climbs past every boundary
just to find the moon,
reaching for the stars.

Each time of day becomes you.
You are dawn’s breath on a violin’s neck,
noon’s blaze caught in gold-threaded fabric,
twilight poured into a wineglass of silence,
while midnight kneels
in hush, praying
in indigos and magentas.

You step into my world,
and the scenery forgets itself.
Even the mountains lean closer,
hoping to be repainted
in your palette.

None can compare.

Even the stars
fall back
to make room for you.

I worship you not in silence,
but in explosion
a thousand golden strings breaking open,
a field of irises trembling in sudden light,
the last note of a requiem
held longer than breath itself.

You are not a destination.
You are the arrival.
The divine storm at the edge of longing.
The shape of the answer
before the question can form.

And I,
glowing like fire beneath snowfall,
sunrise beneath the cathedral of my chest,
waited
just to fall into your name
when you finally call to me

You will come–
to the edge of this world
where the sea inhales the sky,
where silver droplets drip from the hanging moon’s open mouth,
and the pulling tides keep time with my waiting.

You will come–
not as roaring thunder,
but as warmth on tanned salt skin,
a fresh breath stirring the indigo silk of night
in a hidden place beyond naming.

I wait for you
in the distance
with arms open wide,
with hands that have never forgotten
the weight of your presence.
Starfall clings to your hair,
and I let it–
each flicker a gentle kiss you haven’t given yet.

Pull me deeper,
not away–
through distant constellations collapsing in sublime delight,
across golden fields of glowing dust
and cities made only of memory.

There is no disgust here–
only the hunger to be seen,
and the softness of becoming.

My desire is a spoken prayer now,
not an open wound.
You inhabit it
with reverence.

I am not broken.
I am paused–
a held note
in an unwritten song the cestial choirs and stars are still composing.

Call me forward–
with your voice,
not with sorrow,
but with the rhythm of your fingertips
softly brushing the air between us.
Even absence wears your unforgotten scent.

I have not fallen.
I’ve been laid down–
gently–
by the invisible hands of light.

Waiting.
You do not mock.
You shimmer.
This world aches with your outline,
and I praise it
because it holds your splendor and shape.

I draw the curtain of night wide open.
Clouds part like breath beneath your gaze.
The wind does not move without purpose–
it moves with the memory of your fingers,
your presence pressing the sky into form.

I no longer pace.
I rest–
peacefully,
between skin and longing,
between the heat of my pulse
and the ghost of your mouth.

I did not give myself away.
I gave myself to you.
Willfully.
Wanting.
Woven in your majestic gravity.

This is no disgrace.
This is worship.
This is rising
again and again
toward the sun
you left burning in me.

The soft morning rain wore gloves
when it came this time of day –
soft-footed, deliberate,
pressing its palms
against the sun-bleached windowbones,
as if asking permission to enter.

Something peeled the stuttering silence
like bark from a young oak.
I turned the lamp away,
flame flickering,
and let the dust breathe in peace.

The house has no corners anymore.
They’ve rounded themselves
in sleep-surrender,
folded inward
like past regret
stuffed in an old, dusty coat pocket.

They arrived separately –
on different lonely days.
Love came first, trailing thread-lace
and golden strands,
with the smell of stormfruit.
Then Death, later,
with his cold winterglass eyes
and unpunctuated, grasping hands
playing life's final melody on
this old worn out piano.

Funny—neither knocked.
They let the creaking floorboards answer,
split wood speaking
in broken syllables.
Now the worn walls echo backwards.

In the poorly painted hallway –
once rich –
a chandelier sings in lowercase.
Its light barely lifts the carpet,
but moths still come,
dressed for a funeral
that keeps changing addresses.

Love moved the furniture
without touching it.
Chairs gathered in whisper-circles.
The grandfather clock ticks,
its pendulum sways to time’s hand.
Books opened their pulse-spines
and breathed ink-dust into the air.

Death lit a match –
that sulphur-laminate scent
thickening the air –
and braided it into the sugar.
I found the flame burning softly,
hiding in the kettle –
like a secret no one dared stir.

The old ash-jar on the mantle cracked.
A mint-threaded hush rose from it,
hovered a moment,
then settled again,
as if remembering who it belonged to,
before quickly forgetting.

The staircase sighed
like an old tenant remembering rent.
The clouded sky leaned west.
My books slid north toward the windows,
as if pulled by history’s mouth.

Outside, the root-chair is still there –
grown into the fig tree’s spine.
Every morning,
I place a love’s breath on its seat.
It never moves.
Still waiting
for the right weight of a memory.

I keep the forgotten clocks in the drawer.
Their ticklanguage doesn’t match
the breath of the house.
Now I mark hours
by how long it takes
the fly on wallpaper
to hum itself quiet.

The blackened mirrors have forgotten their task.
No light.
No faces.
No questions.
They reflect only the ghostshadow
of who almost stayed.

And still, each night,
the attic exhales fabric-murmurs.
Not footsteps.
Not whispers.
Just the sound of someone
remembering how to stay.

Love wrote something in the evening fog
left on the windowpanes.
Death leaned in
and breathed it away
before it spelled a name.

Now the silence has a shape –
a name.
Now the door locks
from both sides.

And this house?
It doesn’t sleep.
It waits.
It swells with each absence,
ripens with every glance
that doesn’t land.

Love and Death live here.
Not as enemies,
not as lovers –
but as roommates,
who share a silence
too sacred to name.
Still holy.

Write like there is no tomorrow.
Let the ink spill faster than your regrets,
faster than the tide that swallows names from stone.
Let the page burn with your blood
before your mouth remembers silence.

No man controls time.
Not the priest, the poet, the king,
not the one who waits,
not the one who runs.

Life is not given.
It is borrowed breath,
a fragile flicker
on a clock that ticks whether you move or rot.
The hours do not wait.
They do not care.
They do not remember you.

Write because tomorrow may not come.
And if it does,
it may not arrive as you hoped,
or with your name still in your throat.
We are not in control.
We never were.

Moments are sand –
they vanish even as we hold them.
Memories bend and blur,
warped by sorrow, softened by longing.
Tombstones do not speak;
they only mark the aching fact:
we were here.

Pictures fade.
And if no one looks,
the light inside them dies.
Words on a wall mean nothing
if no one knows the tongue.

But thought,
written in ink,
can outlive even the silence –
if it’s read,
if it’s felt,
if it strikes the living like thunder behind the ribs.

Hills rise and crumble.
Trees reach and fall.
All things shift.
All things pass.

So write like there is no tomorrow.
Because sometimes it does not come.
And when it does,
we may already be dust –
scattered down some cobbled road,
whispering stories
only the wind still remembers.

And in the end,
when the ink is dry,
the voices quiet,
and the page begins to yellow –
ask yourself,
would it all matter?
And know the answer lies
in whether you dared to write
at all.