We gather in crowds and whisper of silence,
yearning for touch, yet wincing at hands.
The streets are swollen with voices we summon,
and still, we retreat to the rooms of our minds.

Oh, the terrible weight of desire and distance!
To love so fiercely, yet long to be free,
to build up our houses, then dream of the desert,
to drown in a sea of all we let be.

I have walked between wanting and not,
two corridors lit with a flickering doubt,
one draped in the velvet of intimate longing,
the other a door I am always without.

What a riddle it is, to be so divided,
to hold out a hand and wish it unseen,
to ache for the warmth of an offered embrace,
and shrink from the shadow it leaves in between.

Perhaps we are all just echoes of echoes,
laughing in rooms where no one can hear,
writing our names on the walls of each other,
then leaving, before they can ever appear.