I didn’t want
to wake up today,
As I look
into the mirror,
I see myself,
Rugged, pieces
Here and there,
Almost handsome,
Almost there
But good enough,
I get out the door,
Jump into my car,
Notice the tags
Still say 2024
As I press
The gas pedal
And feel the machine
Alive once more,
I have to get
around that
Some day.

I
Flamboyán whispers,
wrapped gently by the nightfall
the coquí sings true.

II
Clouds become soft quilts,
dreams live curled in the branches
under a sky full of stars.

III
The breeze calls my name,
it smells of earth and heartbeat
my soul finds its rest.

I find myself here
Under the sycamore rain,
Again, loving you.

The seasons shift and change,
Flowers wilt and die to bloom,
The stars burn- dim or bright but they do.
And I? I remain the same.

I keep running round in a glass cage,
They all see me but not the weight.
Trapped and tired and all in vain,
And yet when I trip and finally fall,
I ask myself- why can't I change?

Some things are too whole
to be spoken.

A look.
A breath that almost turned into speech.
The way your shoulder moved
  before the apology
  that never arrived.

We speak so much
  just to hide
  what we actually feel.

But the unsaid -
 it sits quietly
 in the space behind your teeth,
 in the silence between names.

It doesn’t fade.
It settles.

I remember the pause
 more than the sentence.
The moment before
 you almost said
    “don’t go.”

But didn’t.

And that
  has echoed longer
    than any goodbye.

What we don’t say
 doesn’t disappear.
It becomes
 the resonance
    beneath everything we do.

I have love inside me—
not the kind that waits politely
with folded hands in the corners of rooms,
but the kind that grows in the lungs of the sea,
the kind that calls your name through
walls of blood and centuries.

It is a storm that writes letters
on the glass of my bones.
It is a flame that no mouth has kissed.
I offered it—like fruit fallen
from the tree of my chest.

But if no one drinks from me,
if no hands arrive to be burned
by this sacred fire,
then what shall I do
with all this red thunder?

I will not vanish quietly.
If I cannot be loved,
I will become the wind
that shakes the windows of your sleep,
the howl beneath your quiet steps.

Fear me,
not because I am cruel—
but because I once was soft.
Because I once waited
like the earth waits
for rain that never comes.