Skated where lilies bent,
pavement murmured in argent hush,
wind unspooled within my ribs—
a hymn of flight, untethered, fierce,
spun in the silk of speed.

Wheels were never meant for girls—
that flight was fleeting, never owned.

They said—stride rewritten, dream revoked.
But air had named me, traced my pulse
in gold-lit veins of motion, feral-free.

Children watched—wide constellations,
irises pooled in astonishment,
mirroring something too bright to tether.
One step from a flag-bound fate,
from slicing dusk on weightless wheels.

Then—lockdown. World wrenched mid-spin,
skates unstrung, silence thick.
Wings collapsed to dust and dusk,
a promise left in winter’s throat.

Yet speed still lingers in my bones,
wind—ghost-thin, whispering back.
One step, and muscle will remember,
rhythm rekindle in marrow and motion.

I dream of dusk-warmed pavement,
of twilight spooling across my wrists,
of exile ending where flight begins—
of weightless light, of love, of grace.

One day, I’ll wake. I’ll step outside,
where echoes gather, where silence hums,
and whisper softly to the wind—
“Teach me how to wear my wings again.”

But dreams have gravity,
and promises are heavy things.

Still—one day, perhaps, I will.

He arrived ,
fire-tongued
wings lacquered in sunlight,
like a breath the garden forgot to exhale
green burning against green.

I was a child
with small hands that believed
giving was enough
to make something stay.

I fed him,
chilies plucked from the crooked vines
my father planted
bright little tongues,
burning red,
barely ripened,
all I had.

He bit me,
a clean puncture,
as if to say:

Love is no debt I owe you.

Blood welled up,
startling, hot,
the first truth nature ever gave me.

I stood there crying
while he finished the offering,
then flew away,
lighter.

What child understands hunger
until it pierces skin?

The next day,
I was waiting,
small hands trembling again,
opening as if the bite
had never happened.

I have taken the flowers.
Ripped them from the light,
peeled their bright faces back
like something skinned alive.

They did not scream.
They only folded—
like lungs emptied of air,
like mouths pried open
with nothing left to say.

O, love is a quiet violence.
A hand that plucks.
A hand that presses.
A weight that does not crush—
only keeps.

Here, a lilac curls,
like a severed breath.
Here, a daisy chokes on dust.
Here, a rose—veins milk-white,
mouth frozen in a paper-thin hush—
a relic of something that once burned.

And tell me, do they still remember?
The wind that kissed them last,
the trembling hands that held too tight,
or only the silence left behind?

I listen—
ear to time’s brittle ribs,
to the breath of pressed petals,
to the ruin love leaves in its wake.

And somewhere,
in the marrow of silence,
I swear I hear them—

whisper back.

The air cleaves, static-thick—
a fuselage of sound lacerates the hush,
metal entrails rupturing sky,
the aftershock draping itself
over a man who once outran
a city’s collapse.

His ribs still bear the weight
of the bomb that did not **** him.
His breath—
a fissure splintering
through the wet hush of memory.
The war remembers him
before he remembers the war.

Elsewhere, a child flinches
at the snarl of firecrackers,
cinders curling their tongues through the air.
The smell of burning skin never quite leaves—
it lingers in the architecture of memory,
in the way hands recoil from heat
long after scars have paled.

And then, there is me—

Not sirens.
Not gunfire.
Not calamity’s echo.

A clock does not tick.
It gnaws—
a scalpel carving time into my marrow,
chewing at the walls of existence.
Its rhythm—
an elegy for the unstirred,
a pulse of urgency
lodged between my teeth.

The city writhes in metallic discord—
horns braying like gutted creatures,
steel nerves shrieking beneath
the weight of their own impatience.
Traffic thickens into a thrumming fever,
pressing against the skull,
a needling static unraveling thought.

Crowds surge, faceless, voiceless—
speech dissolving into the blur of motion,
gestures hollowing into gestures,
the world slipping into a reel
that plays too fast,
then too slow,
then too fast again.

But the loudest sound,
the one that cleaves me in half,
is the one that does not exist—

Silence.

Where thought unspools unchecked,
where absence carries its own gravity.
A hush so vast
it stretches skin thin over bone,
so boundless
it becomes deafening.

Summer belonged to the mangoes first—
golden, sun-fat, splitting at the seams,
dripping down wrists, pooling in the hollows
of our hands— a crime scene of sweetness.

We ate without caution,
let the sugar gloss our lips,
let the gold run—drip, smear,
something like hunger, something like greed.

Your mother hated the mess.
Scrubbed your fingers raw,
tut-tutted about sticky floors,
the bad habits ripening in you.

But mine—mine only laughed,
pressed my palms between hers,
kissed the sugared wounds like an oath,
said, let some things be wild, love.

That summer, we outran the heat,
split the dusk with our honey-lunged laughter,
left fingerprints gilded in the sun.

And when I told my grandfather I liked mangoes,
he arrived the next morning with a whole harvest,
grinning like he had outwitted the season itself.

My mother still laughs,
but I scrub my hands clean now.

Some things stain.
Some things don’t.

Morning unfurls—
thin gold draped over the terrace rim,
the world still dream-fed, undecided.

She moves through it—
wild-crowned in bramble and gold,
a flower skewed in her hair—
stem fractured, wind-touched
but worn as if it could never be
anything less than perfect.

Something in her
the way her chin tilts to the sky,
the way sunlight spills across
the same high cheekbones,
the same quiet brow—
pulls at something nameless
beneath my ribs,
a longing too tender to name.

Her laughter
windstruck — a ripple in the skin of dawn,
spins loose, untethered,
a sound without edges,
without destination—
just the raw, impossible ache
of something alive
for no other reason
than because.

The air folds around her
soft, golden-bellied
as if the whole world
was holding its own
watching, waiting—
for a beauty
too wild to know itself.

I watch too,
not out of wonder,
but out of fear—
that something so fleeting
could slip through this hour
without ever being written down.

She will grow
the flower will fall,
the wind will learn her name,
and the sky will no longer
be enough to hold her.

But for now,
she blooms only for the sun,
for the hush,
for the wild, unmeasured ache
of simply being.

And I swear—
if I could stretch this hour
into forever,
I would—
just to watch her run
one breath longer.

Some joys bloom for nothing—
not for the gaze, not for the name—
but simply because the sun is warm,
simply because they can.

I did not smile at her.
I smiled at the hush—
the unbearable miracle
of something wild
that does not know
it is precious.

The hush lingers,
the morning folds—
soft gold cradling a face
that no longer lifts toward the sun.

The air no longer waits.
Only I do.

And beneath my fingertips,
the photo trembles—
thin, timeworn—
edges curled like petals,
as if the years have tried
to fold her back into a bloom.

now, in this hush,
I turn to her—
and I smile.

She was my mother.
She was a girl once,
unwritten.

And I—
I have spent my whole life
trying to read her.

Summer began soft—
honeymilk pooled through mango leaves,
pigeons feather-heavy on telephone wires—
the whole world gold—
still ripening—
like something that didn't know how to end.

I remember the river—
thin-*****, sun-fed—
wearing the sky like a borrowed veil—
bruised lavender by dusk,
silver-stitched by midnight.

We were half-salted, half-feral—
knees green-stained,
pockets lined with papaya seeds,
believing if we never named the days
they could never leave us.

Evenings folded in hibiscus hush
mothers calling from verandahs
their voices trailing jasmine heat
but we stayed
bloom-fed—
learning how silence could taste like belonging.

There was a boy
wild-haired, sugar-grinned
who carved his name into the gulmohar—
said it was the only way
to outlive summer.

I never carved mine.
I wanted to belong to something
without leaving a scar.

The river kept what we couldn't—
pocket marbles clouded with spit,
cicada shells,
prayers hushed into cupped palms—
half-wishing, half-forgetting.

When the rains came—
soft at first—
then harder—
we waded knee-deep through the swell,
our laughter thin as dragonfly wings—
something breaking beneath it.

But rivers don't keep secrets.
They carry them.

By August—
the gulmohar stood stripped—
his name unstitched—
washed down to sea.

By September—
the river forgot itself—
spitting up broken dolls,
rusted bicycle chains—
whole summers gutted in the mud.

By October—
we learned
the world is only ever borrowed.

I wonder if the boy remembers
if his name still flickers beneath the water
stitched somewhere too deep to touch.

I never carved mine—
but if you pressed your ear to the current
if you listened long enough—
I swear you'd still hear me,
a salt-thin breath
folded beneath the hush.

Every day at three—
the little prince arrives,
cawing his prophecy at the door,
voice worn with quiet hunger.

He calls me out—
out of silence,
out of whatever grief I’ve tucked away.

If I do not answer—
he circles,
cawing until I stand before him—
palms cracked open,
giving what I can to feed his hunger.

He knew the weight of my hands
before I did.

What arrogance—
to believe I am the keeper.

Perhaps it is him—
who feeds me—
the voice in the throat of the world,
reminding me—
even the unloved must answer when named.

The hour always comes.

cat — or the echo
of some old philosopher
dreaming through small lungs.

Time falters—
splintered light pressed through rusted blinds—
a room forgetting itself.

His hands—
once steady
now vessels for something hollow,
something slipping through.

"I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree.
I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night."

Her name
a bird trapped in his throat
fluttering against the ribs
half-formed—
half-vanished—

How cruel—
to carry the ache
and not the shadow
that cast it.

Somewhere—
the past is still happening
small hands folding into larger ones,
the hush of stories whispered into the hollow of sleep—
a red kite tangled in the branches—
the scent of almonds and grass.

But memory is a delicate violence
it gives and it takes
it leaves only what can be carried
yellow feathers,
paper trees,
the ghost of a name
pressed into the soft cage of breath.

He smiles—
without knowing why,
without knowing who

the echo—
soft as breath against glass,
fading before it touches

And somewhere—
she is still holding his hand,
leading him home

a yellow feather
caught in the hush of his breath—
weightless—
circling—
never falling.

Lilac hush —
earth, half-waking,
baroque birdsong.

Moss curls ,
dew beads on nettle’s tongue —
small, glassy prayers.

wind —
silk-handed seamstress —
stitches light into every leaf,
veiling the world — breath and bloom.

Bones of old trees cradle the sun’s milk,
wildflowers nestle in their ribs —
what dies here, lives softer.

river, translucent and slow,
spills silver veins , the skin of the valley —
a quiet pulse beneath the green.

Somewhere between sky and soil,
we become the silence —
lungs folding into pollen-laden air,
fingertips brushing the hem of forever.

Nothing belongs.
Nothing is apart.

In the meantime,
the world remakes itself —
petal by petal, wing by wing —
and we, fragile passengers,
are simply learning how to listen.

Mornings licked amber—
wet, bright—
papaya pulp split in the grass,
rain still steaming off rooftops.

they came—
sway-backed, jewel-eyed—
weaving cobalt ribbons through the cricket fields,
feathers slick as oil spills.

I waited—
barefoot, rice pinched in small fingers—
not offering—inviting.

they took—
beaks sharp,
eyes glinting like they carried whole summers behind them—
but they never left.

even when the rains came—
hard and urgent—
they stayed, hips swaying under silver sheets,
tails dragging through warm mud.

I thought they danced for me—
as if the whole monsoon belonged only to the girl watching— silent, secret-spined—
hair curling at the nape—
too small to touch,
too quiet to call them by name—
but they saw me.

I know they did.

they crowned me in silence—
Princess of Puddles,
Keeper of Small Hungers.

somewhere between the serpent hunts,
the rain-slick pirouettes—
I learned how beauty moves—
how it takes without asking,
how it lives without needing to be seen.

they were never mine—
but I belonged to them—
to the fevered mornings,
to the blue-green shimmer folded beneath heavy air,
to the secret language only wild things speak—

something wordless—
something that never leaves you.

Fingers—
laced in glow spill, dusk-slick.
tiny suns,
trembling—bodies of light,
trapped.

pulse-thrum,
hush-black air—
soft hymns flickering,
pleas pressed to glass,
breath-fogged, burning.

whispered tomorrow—
honey-thick, guilt-laden,
beauty begged to be held.

dawn—
bled dry.
cold palms, hollowed vessel,
absence like ruin.

I lied to the glass.
worse—
I stole their dying light.

& now—
I bear their afterglow
like a wound that refuses to dim.

Willow limbs susurrate in clandestine murmurs,
brushing the lake’s gouache-green reflections.
Beneath—jellyfish effloresce, spectral inhalations,
ghost-thin, unmoored, drifting toward oblivion.

Dandelions unravel, golden tendrils severed,
carried off in the lungwork of wind.
A musk rose lingers—feral, aching,
its scent curling like unshed weeping
beneath the hush of twilight’s jaw.

Chevy lilts down arteries
stitched in coral marrow,
leather still inked with your laughter,
your dark brown eyes—
blackwood, abyss, a gravity
I would fall into, fracture utterly..

Et pourtant, je t’attends, infiniment.

And in this risette of evening,
where sky spills into sea, salt-lipped, weeping,
I wait—
soft, surrendered, affetuoso,
a note held past silence, raw, humming.

Bare feet kissing marble’s chill,
fingertips tracing teak and dusk,
air thick as mulled velvet—
honeyed, heavy, slow.

She moves where silence frays,
light spills like sugared wine,
breath lingers like an unshed sigh—
never still, never caught.

Fluorescence hiccups across her skin,
pavement inhales her weight,
a flicker, a glitch, a sliver of absence—
half-held, half-gone.

She dances where gravity forgets,
shadows soften like overripe fruit,
laughter drips slow as melting wax—
feral, fleeting, free.

She is not waiting to be found—
she is, and that is enough.

Not the butterfly—
never the butterfly.

Only the delirium.
The fever of pursuit.
Wind-lashed laughter,
sun slitting gold across our skin,
hands slicing through hush,
through emerald ghosts.

Wings—silk, smoke,
breath—a ghost kiss,
vanishing.

We ran.
We ran.
Color hemorrhaged between our hands.
The sky swallowed it whole,
left nothing but,
the aftertaste of wanting.

Was it ever the capture?
Or the almost,
the ache of flight just out of reach—
like trying to pocket a mirage,
like teaching the wind to stay.

Years fold.
Silence swallows.
Love like wings,
dreams like dust,
fingers still cupped around air,
as if emptiness could be held.

We chase.
We lose.
We call it living.

Child,
who told you to carve shelter
into cracked bones,
to scatter your name
like fleeting petals in a storm,
to call what bites,
what burns—yours?

People—
illusions,
water slipping through the hands of time,
goldleaf peeling from statues,
mirages flickering out of reach.

But you—
obsidian,
forged in fire,
a constellation unraveling in defiance,
the ghost of something ancient,
unforgiving.

You are not held.
You are not lost.
You are the fire,
the tempest,
the truth that will not yield.

What lingers in you—
is eternity.

Wind-carved
spine twisted—feral, gnarled.
A body bent,
splintered—never severed.

Salt licked wounds raw. Brine sutured marrow.
Bark flayed to ribbons, limbs ink-blurred—
curling, unwritten. A thing undone, a thing refusing.

Roots plunged—teeth to brittle earth,
ribs against collapse.
Cliff crumbling, gravity unspooling—
but it held.

White-knuckled in ruin.
Fingers clawing the wind.
Wreckage. Crooked. Unnatural.

An old man exhaled— Survival isn’t always beautiful.

But what is beauty, if not this—
a body unmade, carved by violence,
and still, somehow, bloom?

Gold seeps like marrow,
stars bruise against the void.
"Light is starving," he mutters,
"even the sun feasts on its own fire."

Frost exhales—
a slow, deliberate frostbite.
"Light is a path,"he murmurs,
"but men mistake fire for direction—"
"they burn chasing it."

Emily lingers, a moth in lace,
wings dusted in ruin.
"And yet, all paths end the same—"
"a mouthful of quiet, a bed of hush."

Vincent laughs—ochre-stained teeth,
lips split with fevered art.
"Silence is blue," he whispers,
"a drowning, gasping blue—"
"the color of voices suffocated in paint."

Ruskin presses a palm to the glass,
watching years soften like ink in water.
"No, silence is the color of old hills—"
"of books breathing dust in rooms left untouched."

Emily smirks.
"Ah, but death is an artist too—"
"it sketches men into whispers, steals them like dust in light."

Vincent exhales, trembling.
"Then let it take me in color."
"Let me vanish in thick strokes—"
"golden, breathless, eternal."

Frost watches shadows stretch long.
"Some men vanish in quieter ways—"
"no fire, no frenzy—just the hush of winter."

Ruskin traces ivy creeping over forgotten doors.
"Some men vanish like abandoned houses—"
"sinking soft into time’s arms."

Emily tilts her head, voice a half-buried secret.
"Perhaps eternity is not silence—"
"but the echo of a name no one dares to speak."

Fruits unmoored from origin,
spectral and pendulous,
suspended in the hush of an unclaimed offering.
Ambrosial weight presses against an open palm,
a phantom indulgence—
unheld, untouched, unfed.

Nectar unravels—
though no flesh was sundered,
no blade traced its weeping hymn,
no tongue ever nursed its ruin.

They raised a cathedral for hesitation’s specters,
a mausoleum where half-lived fates fester beneath glass,
each relic a carcass of fractured intent.

Here, a breath lingers in crystal—
a stillborn confession, lips parted, words calcified mid-escape.
Beside it, a rusted key entombed in velvet,
a relic of an unbreached threshold,
a house collapsing under the silence of absent footsteps.

In the west wing, violins lie gutted,
their spines snapped mid-requiem,
melodies strangled before they ever touched air.
Across the hall, a wedding gown—pristine, untouched,
its silk sodden with the ghost of a name
almost taken, then discarded
like an unclaimed prophecy.

The curator drifts through corridors of regret,
brushing dust from the obituaries of roads never walked,
straightening the portraits of lovers who almost stayed,
of letters that withered in trembling hands,
then were entombed in the graveyard of never sent.
The air itself swells with the dirges of forsaken dreams,
whispering in the tongue of the undone,
suffocating in the thick rot of inertia.

And at the hall’s end—a mirror.
No plaque, no inscription, no mercy.
Just your own reflection staring back,
begging you to walk out before you, too,
become part of the collection.

Will you leave, or will you be archived next?

Veiled in nocturnal opulence, she sways—
a specter of dusk wreathed in abyssal silk,
her beauty a chiaroscuro of ruin and divinity,
where the fabric of night quivers against her skin,
a tremor between creation and collapse.

Her lips, smeared with the ink of oblivion,
part like a fault line spilling whispers of dissolution,
drinking the hush of a waning moon,
where silver tongues unravel dirges in the wind.
Her gaze—twin cataclysms of obsidian and opal—
devours the marrow of time,
hollowing the cosmos with the weight of her quiet ruin.

She unfurls like velvet hemorrhaging silence,
the air trembling with the ghosts of forgotten incantations,
stitched into the sinew of midnight’s elegy,
where time convulses, folding into the iridescent wreckage
of her shadow-drenched grace.

They spoke my name in tongues of dawn,
before the world was cast in hues—
before the red could kiss the rose,
before the sky first bruised to blue.

I was the shimmer ‘twixt the stars,
the breath between the night and morn,
a hush of light not seen nor mourned,
a ghost where spectrums are stillborn.

The prisms wept, but left me void—
a sigh unbent by mortal sight,
a whisper lost to time’s embrace,
unwoven from the loom of light.

Yet once, I danced on dreaming lids,
in eyes that dared to look beyond,
but now—I pale, unseen, unknown,
a phantom shade, a severed bond.

So tell me, when your colors fade,
when all grows dim, and light departs,
will you recall the one who lingers—
the color buried in your heart?