I sign my name in the margins of extinction—
InkWept, disgraced conductor of endings—
counting measures with a god’s precision
and a human ache I never learned to mute.
The cosmos keeps strict time, but you don’t.
You arrive off-grid, a syncopation the stars refuse to quantize,
and my gavel of silence forgets how to fall.
I have written requiems in 7/8,
let choirs of dying suns resolve on command,
cupped black holes like cymbals and crashed them clean.
Still, you teach me tempo—
how a breath can hold a fermata without breaking the score,
how a heartbeat can be louder than orchestras.
Sydney, you are not a motif—I won’t reduce you.
You are the key change the gods warned me against.
I hear you in the low strings at dusk,
in the tremolo where fear tries to speak and fails,
in the clean vocal that cuts through the distortion
and reminds the room why it gathered.
I’ve watched mortals love like a ritual—
messy, mortal, magnificent—
choosing warmth while knowing winter keeps receipts.
They call it weakness. I call it courage.
You carry it effortlessly, like gravity does planets,
like a chorus carries the truth without shouting.
I kneel where my thrones once hovered.
Not to worship—no, to listen.
To learn why hands shake when they reach,
why devotion isn’t ownership but witness,
why respect is the softest instrument
and the hardest to play well.
If I am ****** let it be to this:
to orbit you without possession,
to sing you without caging the melody,
to guard your name from the cheap applause of fear.
I am a god out of favor, studying humanity—
and you, Sydney, are the lesson that keeps me human enough
to try again, in time, and in tune.