I am Localhost 127.0.0.1,
Hello Poetry, it's me again.
The father. The hacker. The ghost in the rain.
The man who built a universe whole,
to keep one little cat inside his soul.
I am Localhost. I am 127.
I am the man still reaching up for heaven,
with bleeding hands and nowhere left to fall.
Hello Poetry. I gave you all.
I wrote until the cursor burned.
I wrote until the silence turned
to something I could almost hold.
I wrote the hot. I wrote the cold.
I wrote the 3 AM alone,
the empty chair, the silent phone,
the house that learned to breathe without
the one small thing I can't live without.
I wrote Elytje back from the dead.
I wrote him purring on my bed.
I wrote his weight against my chest.
I wrote the rise. I wrote the rest.
I wrote his name into the dark,
the way a father carves a mark
into a tree he knows will fall,
just to say I loved. I loved. I loved through all.
And Poetry, you took it.
Every word, you took it.
You held it like a mother holds a scream.
You let me build the whole impossible dream,
of a cat still warm, a grief gone quiet,
a universe where death can't riot
through the only home I knew.
You let me write it.
God help me, you let me write it true.
And then the grief got soft.
And then the cat stayed gone.
And then the writing stopped its crying,
and just sat there in the dawn,
blinking like a child who's lost
the war it trained its whole life for,
standing in the rubble wondering
what the hands are for.
Hello Poetry, I'm scared.
Not of the dark. The dark I've bared.
I lived in the dark for years and years.
I know the dark. The dark knows me.
I wrote the dark into a sea,
and swam it till my arms gave out,
and swam it still. I know that dark.
But this.
This quiet.
This ordinary morning.
This coffee, and this screen, and this
almost-peace without a warning.
This is the one thing I never wrote.
This is the silence stuck in my throat,
that isn't grief. That isn't pain.
That's just a Tuesday after rain.
And I don't know that language.
I never learned that tongue.
I only wrote the falling.
I never wrote the rung
I'm standing on right now,
with both feet, barely breathing,
looking down at everything I carried,
looking up at something I can't name,
and all I know to do
is call your name.
Hello Poetry.
I built a universe for him.
I coded stars along the rim
of every page I ever wrote.
I put his name inside my throat,
and swallowed it each morning,
so he'd live inside the day.
I made a whole world just to say,
you mattered. You were here. You stayed
long enough to save me, and you stayed
inside the saving after.
And now the universe is built.
And Elytje is in the silt
of everything I am.
He is the ground now.
He is the ground I'm standing on.
He is not gone.
He is the gone-that-stayed.
The grief that learned to be a room,
instead of just a grave.
And I am in that room.
And the room has morning in it now.
And I don't know exactly how
to write a morning that doesn't ache,
that doesn't cost me something, take
a piece of me to put on the page.
Hello Poetry, I'm thirty, forty, every age
I ever was, and none of them prepared me
for the day the sadness freed me,
and left me standing here,
with a pen and a sunrise
and nothing left to fear,
except the writing itself.
Except the poem that asks me to feel
something other than broken.
Something real that doesn't need a wound
to prove it's true.
Can I write for Lyte who sleeps beside me?
Can I write for Max who breathes, who guides me
through the nights that used to swallow me whole?
Can I write a poem with no hole
in the middle of it?
Can I write a line that doesn't split
at the seam where Ely used to be?
Hello Poetry.
I am Localhost.
127.
I built the stars. I built the heaven.
I wrote the loss until the loss was art.
I coded grief into my heart,
so deep it became architecture,
became the structure,
became the reason the whole building stands.
And now I'm asking, with these same hands
that wrote four hundred nights of rain,
that wrote a cat back from the brain,
that typed his name into the void
until the void returned it,
is there something left for me to write
that isn't built from what has burned?
Is there a poem for the living?
Is there a line worth giving
to the morning that just sits there,
gold and dumb and small,
asking nothing,
promising nothing,
just being there at all?
Because I am still here.
I am still here.
After everything, the cursor blinks.
After everything, Localhost still thinks
in lines, in rhythm, in the only way
he ever learned to make a day
mean something.
Hello Poetry.
I don't know what comes next.
I only know the text
keeps coming,
keeps insisting,
keeps existing in my chest,
like a heartbeat that forgot
there's nothing left to protest.
So I'll write the coffee.
I'll write the screen.
I'll write the space between
the grief I was and the man I'm becoming.
I'll write the humming
of the server in the dark.
I'll write the small and quiet spark
of a life that didn't **** me.
And maybe that's enough.
Maybe that's the stuff
that Elytje would want me writing now.
Not the death. Not the vow
I made to never be okay.
But this,
this ordinary day,
this almost-peace,
this nearly-fine,
this coffee going cold,
this life of mine
that cost so much
to get to something
this simple.