they say a poet
cannot fall in love
with their own poems
forever,
but it’s no wonder, my love,
that my heart plays
on piano keys,
without white-filtered films,
with your voice only at the end,
I pretend to be a series
without you.

I am not your lover,
you are not mine,
yet what is it with us
that makes the ground tremble
in the absence of us,
in the shattered eclipse
of your brown eyes?

Poetry isn’t something you smoke in secret.
It isn’t a drama struck on the tip of a match.
It is nothing at all
once the heart stops beating.

You don’t get to read me
as if you already know.
Not with that softened gaze,
not with lungs left hollow.

Poetry isn’t smoked—
yet somehow
you inhale it endlessly,
left with dizziness spun from metaphor,
with whirlwinds of silence
that burn,
or else
ache
quietly.

I frown.
how many lives do I need
to count my poems
from a suitcase
without losing track
and giving up?

Words of clay,
and I know there’s no need for words,
only steps that no longer echo.
Behind me,
your shadow hides on the ceiling.

In the lead of time,
between you and me—
an empty room,
walls pressing harder than silence.
Suffocation, the dowry left in the hall.

Cursed I am,
I feel your shadow at my back,
but when I turn
it’s only a void with broken light,
in frozen circles of frost.

My hand trembles on the edge of the bed,
touching nothing,
yet everything collapses
at my feet.

A white stain, a darkened room.
I breathe off-beat,
as if music itself refuses me.
An untouched piano
screams without notes in the background.

But what poem needs eyelids,
when Lucifer appears to me, gentle?

And if this is our final melody,
let it flow without words,
like a heart
that only beats in echo.

Do not shy away from me—
what death, in off-beat,
can repeat itself
without me feeling it?