I learned myself by the slow attrition of days
by measuring each syllable against the pulse of my own essence,
and settling its debt in the quiet tremor of my spirit.
Do I not know the sovereignty of language,
its sharp wind and its subtle flame?
Has not candor stripped my lips raw,
yet left my tongue luminous,
scarred but unbowed?
My voice was never gifted whole;
it was forged in the furnace of absence,
tempered by my fatigue and the vigil of nights,
where the firmament murmured only to itself,
and the constellations traced riddles across my restless mind.
I do not write from the theatrics of naïve despair;
did I choose these words because they betrayed me,
or because I could not allow betrayal to define my existence?
I choose, therefore I persist,
not by faith, but by my own unyielding devotion to the act.
I navigate thought as one drifts across a lake of fractured crystal,
each idea a prism reflecting a sky I cannot enter,
the currents of my reflection twist without end.
Memory rises like burning mercury over flowing amber,
its flow carrying the heat of what I was,
yet forming intricate lattices I can still touch.
Even absence holds shape,
even silence can be sculpted into echo.
Language rests in my hands and on tongue like frost on lava formed obsidian glass,
its edges keen, even surgical, its resonance still trembling with self restraint.
Shall I leave it mute, untested?
or shall I coax the frost to sing a lullaby,
for even my shattered lyre remembers its own rhyme and soft touch of music,
and my void preserves its own geometry.
When I write of collapse,
I do not crumble;
certainly tension endures,
even as my undoing bends toward pattern,
and each line I trace is a beam
propping the architecture of my persistence and understanding.
Do I seek rescue?
Do I yearn for redemption?
nay for this is where i now swim,
I dwell in the narrow country between extremes,
where I am both witness and artisan.
My suffering is not spectacle;
it is my ledger of encounter,
a carefully crafted journal of truth,
my testament, not a plea.
Each line I cast into the void
is a root pressed into the bedrock of my solitude, coal that will find precious existence,
proof that I have traversed my exile
and refused erasure, that in these line there is something greater than salvation.
There is courage here, and hope although it whispers.
Is my courage that,
a act of believing, or of enduring without promise?
To admit that wonder does not always answer, that the muse ignores,
that meaning sometimes refuses to arrive,
yet still i carve absence into contour,
grant the void a silhouette, a shadow
and call it my own
is that not my quietest triumph?
It's this i ask myself.....
I am not guided by hope, but it's there, in a brittle prism; it fractures in my tightened grasp.
I am guided by integrity and my personal truth to self
the austere discipline of remaining upright
when inspiration has abandoned my chamber.
This is not the work of one chasing fire;
it is my tale, my witness, my testament of how I burn without.
I stand in the frost of my unlit hours,
marking the darkness with lines of light,
aware that the void listens,
and I write what pours from within
not to be saved, or even remembered
but to be awake,
and fully, inexorably, myself,
on a journey to find the line that defines what's real.
Jan 7
Jan 7, 2026 at 11:38 AM UTC
I learned myself by the slow attrition of days
by measuring each syllable against the pulse of my own essence,
and settling its debt in the quiet tremor of my spirit.
Do I not know the sovereignty of language,
its sharp wind and its subtle flame?
Has not candor stripped my lips raw,
yet left my tongue luminous,
scarred but unbowed?
My voice was never gifted whole;
it was forged in the furnace of absence,
tempered by my fatigue and the vigil of nights,
where the firmament murmured only to itself,
and the constellations traced riddles across my restless mind.
I do not write from the theatrics of naïve despair;
did I choose these words because they betrayed me,
or because I could not allow betrayal to define my existence?
I choose, therefore I persist,
not by faith, but by my own unyielding devotion to the act.
I navigate thought as one drifts across a lake of fractured crystal,
each idea a prism reflecting a sky I cannot enter,
the currents of my reflection twist without end.
Memory rises like burning mercury over flowing amber,
its flow carrying the heat of what I was,
yet forming intricate lattices I can still touch.
Even absence holds shape,
even silence can be sculpted into echo.
Language rests in my hands and on tongue like frost on lava formed obsidian glass,
its edges keen, even surgical, its resonance still trembling with self restraint.
Shall I leave it mute, untested?
or shall I coax the frost to sing a lullaby,
for even my shattered lyre remembers its own rhyme and soft touch of music,
and my void preserves its own geometry.
When I write of collapse,
I do not crumble;
certainly tension endures,
even as my undoing bends toward pattern,
and each line I trace is a beam
propping the architecture of my persistence and understanding.
Do I seek rescue?
Do I yearn for redemption?
nay for this is where i now swim,
I dwell in the narrow country between extremes,
where I am both witness and artisan.
My suffering is not spectacle;
it is my ledger of encounter,
a carefully crafted journal of truth,
my testament, not a plea.
Each line I cast into the void
is a root pressed into the bedrock of my solitude, coal that will find precious existence,
proof that I have traversed my exile
and refused erasure, that in these line there is something greater than salvation.
There is courage here, and hope although it whispers.
Is my courage that,
a act of believing, or of enduring without promise?
To admit that wonder does not always answer, that the muse ignores,
that meaning sometimes refuses to arrive,
yet still i carve absence into contour,
grant the void a silhouette, a shadow
and call it my own
is that not my quietest triumph?
It's this i ask myself.....
I am not guided by hope, but it's there, in a brittle prism; it fractures in my tightened grasp.
I am guided by integrity and my personal truth to self
the austere discipline of remaining upright
when inspiration has abandoned my chamber.
This is not the work of one chasing fire;
it is my tale, my witness, my testament of how I burn without.
I stand in the frost of my unlit hours,
marking the darkness with lines of light,
aware that the void listens,
and I write what pours from within
not to be saved, or even remembered
but to be awake,
and fully, inexorably, myself,
on a journey to find the line that defines what's real.
07 January 2026
Architecture of Absence
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
