I pressed my ear to the silence
and heard you humming
not a tune,
but a presence,
a bruise that remembers
the shape of the fist.

Your absence
grows roots in my organs,
cracks in my ribs
where memory nests
and lays its spiteful eggs.

I speak,
but the breath is borrowed.
I dream,
and wake up with hands
not mine,
holding guilt
I don’t remember baking
but still swallow whole.

You live in the slant
of my posture,
a tilt toward grief
I’ve mistaken for normal.
Even my stillness
is contaminated—
your fingerprints
pressed into my pause.

What name do I scream
when I scream inside?
Is it yours
or mine distorted,
choked through the filter
of a childhood overwritten
by trespass?

I tried to evict you
with fire,
but flame licked my skin
and whispered:
you brought this match.

I’m tired
of being haunted
by someone still alive,
tired of rooms
that smell like your last word,
of smiles I wear
like splinters.

I dig
through my psyche’s landfill
and keep pulling up
your broken watch,
ticking in reverse,
counting down
to a version of me
that never escaped.

What is identity
if it echoes?
If every mirror
I’ve smashed
bleeds your face?

No, I never let you in
you seeped,
spilled,
rewrote the blueprint
of my breath
while I was still
learning to count my ribs.

And now
I build myself
from scratch,
but every nail I hammer
sings your lullaby
in rusted rhythm.

Still
I keep building.

I tear into mirrors
not for answers
for the shimmer
of something half-familiar,
your shape
in the slipstream of my pupils,
lips I don’t own
forming apologies I don’t remember earning.

Call it self-reflection
but I am crowded
by you
like a rot beneath the drywall,
silent, patient,
building mold in my monologues.

My thoughts
barcoded
with your syntax,
your sighs
etched into the pause between
my thoughts,
like a watermark from a life I never consented to carry.

Who infected who?
Who tainted who's soul?
Who really lit the fire !

I dive into the trench of self,
flashlight trembling,
heart like wet laundry on rusted wire.
All I find
is your mouth in my voice,
your rage in my stillness,
your shadow curled in fetal syntax.

I am a footnote
in your biography of absence.
You
the poet I never wanted in my pen.

Did I choose this?
Did I script this tether?
Or did you graffiti my soul
when I was too young
to know how to lock a door?

I scratch at my skin
to find boundaries
but my blood whispers
your name like a psalm
sung backward
at midnight
by a child who forgot God.

I know more of you
than you ever offered,
and less of myself
each time I touch the mirror
and it flinches.

So I light a fire
in the basement of my mind
to smoke you out
but all that flees
wears my face.