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Always and never
at the same exact time,
infinitely wondering about you
in rhyme.

It's painful and numbing,
and soothes me to sleep
yet keeps me wide awake,
dry-eyed
until I weep.

A memory of nothing
that was everything to me-
such a little long time
amidst the grand scheme.

A golden ticket to rot in hell,
a barren fate
I'll accept very well.

An altering strand
in a web of conscience,
my previous beliefs
now all make me nauseous.

A single star
with no constellation,
believe it or not-
my soul’s favorite destination.

I wish it never happened,
but I’d do it again
just to reprioritize
the time we would spend.

It’s not quite missing,
and I wouldn’t call it an ache;
my heart is perfectly fine
until she starts to break.

But if I unknew you-
if you just stayed a dream-
I’d know I’d never have to deal
with the relieving pain of your leave.
The desire to undo and redo
At the same **** time..
I'm

Falling apart and rotting away
Insecure, lost, with nowhere to stay
Nothing worth loving, an echo to ****
Endlessly crying on my window sill
Just tired today
The days move on,
but my heart stays still—
stuck in the moment
you slipped beyond my reach.

I search the silence
for the sound of your laugh,
trace the shadows
for a glimpse of your light.

Every sunrise feels empty
without you to greet it,
every night falls heavier
without your voice to guide me home.

I carry your memory
like a fragile flame,
shielding it from the winds
of time and forgetting.

I’m missing you deeply—
in the quiet, in the noise,
in the space between heartbeats
where you once lived.

And until I see you again,
I’ll keep loving you
across this impossible distance,
hoping somehow, you feel it still.
 Aug 3 Rubyredheart
Xek0u
Beneath the veil of endless night,
The stars are born in quiet light.
Dust of galaxies, scattered far,
A cosmic dance, a distant star.

In the dark, the North Star gleams,
A beacon bright, the keeper of dreams.
Guiding souls through wind and tide,
A steadfast light that won’t subside.

The ocean hums in endless blue,
A rhythm old, a pulse so true.
It mirrors skies, both deep and vast,
Where stardust falls, and hearts beat fast.

The waves caress the shore with grace,
As if the sea, in endless chase,
Would capture stars and carry them,
To light the night, to guide again.

So in the whispers of the sea,
And in the stars that call to me,
I find a truth that's pure and near—
That we are stardust, crystal-clear.

Bound by tides and shining bright,
Like stars above in endless flight.
We drift, we rise, we find our way,
By stardust trails and ocean spray.
 Jul 29 Rubyredheart
Malcolm
I did not know it then
how much of my life I spent
in pursuit of people
who stood behind curtains,
who spoke in half-gestures,
who never saw me at all.
And I
I mistook their silence for grace,
their distance for depth,
wasted hours praising shadows,
thinking they were saints.

Age crept in like a quiet thief
while I argued with the wind,
burning every bridge behind me
not for revenge,
but for honesty
because I couldn’t keep pretending
the path was paved with purpose
when all I saw were stones
and no clear road ahead.

I wandered through philosophies
like a drunk through alleys,
looking for the one window
still lit at 3 a.m.
some voice to say:
you were right to doubt,
you were right to bleed.
But every answer I found
sounded too rehearsed,
too clean,
like the kind of lie
taught in churches and schools
by those who never questioned
the god they worshipped.

I used to think there was something
waiting on the other side of pain
a reward, a reckoning,
a soft hand or a white gate
but the more I lived,
the more I saw how many men
broke themselves
waiting for something
that never came.

What if this is it?
What if all we ever had
was the breath between two silences,
the taste of wine on a Sunday night,
the brief flicker of touch
before sleep swallows us whole?

The world has always belonged
to those who claimed certainty.
They built empires on our questions,
wrote sacred texts from our fear,
used our doubt
as currency
to buy power,
to sell guilt.

And we—we folded our hands,
pretended to be holy,
afraid to ask:
what if no one is watching?
what if no one ever was?

Still, I don't mind now.
Whether the end is fire,
or dust,
or just a deep forgetting,
I find peace in knowing
that my suffering
was not for applause,
that no angel tallied my failures,
no devil stoked the furnace
for my crimes.

I live now
not because I believe,
but because I breathe.
I wake not with purpose,
but with hunger
to feel, to see, to ruin, to rise.

Let the priests whisper,
let the mystics dream.
I will walk this road barefoot,
****** if I must,
toward the same silence
that swallows kings and beggars alike.

Because in the end,
there is only one truth worth knowing
that none of us knows
and that this
is the only freedom
we were ever given.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
 Jul 27 Rubyredheart
Malcolm
Tears don’t always fall.
They drift in the mind
like satellites
loosed from orbit,
slow-motion signals
across the blackroom of time.
Not grief,
but gravity remembering.

Love isn’t a moment
it’s a constellation
burned into the hands of an oaken clock and every breath,
a frequency that keeps pulsing
long after touch has stilled.

You never forget the day they vanished, the shape they left behind
an imprint in the air and universe
like heat after lightning,
like a silhouette scorched
into the filmstrip of your soul.

Some things pass in a second
But memory?
Memory is spacetime’s rebel.
It lingers longer than a moment itself
It's a glitch in the hourglass,
a clock that refuses
to stop ticking
even when the hands are gone
it still chimes.

They may have drifted
maybe forgotten from time to time ,
maybe just changed shapes
but when you reach inside
you still see their face
in reflections,
hear their voice
in the background static
of late-night silence.

We carry them:
in bloodline-chords,
in laughlines carved from shared jokes,
in arguments we still finish
alone.

Moments become galaxies
in the afterglow
brightbursts we revisit in an instance
when everything else fades.
Time dissolves,
but memory is ours to keep
memory is a stardust archivist.
It is our catalog of love lost and found
in the particles
we breathe without knowing.

And so we orbit one another forever
even when apart,
family and loved ones remain
a constellation-map
etched in soul-skin.

The world moves forward,
but the hands of time on some clocks refuse to reset.
Because we were built to feel
to remember,
to carry love
beyond the math of minutes and moments.

And when the universe forgets
we don’t because love lives in our hearts forever

We gather the remnants,
build temples from echoes,
and stand together
in the gravity
of what once was,
holding it all until the day memory fold us together
again
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
July 2025
Where Memory outlives Time
 Jul 19 Rubyredheart
Erenn
We were just
two shadows in a field of blue
a white sigh and a black whisper
lost between petals
and the hush of things unspoken
The world didn’t know our names—
but the flowers did.
They watched you lean into me
like a prayer left unspoken.

We danced without music
just the rhythm of glances
the poetry of tilts and tilting heads
at old wooden windows
where time paused—
as if even it was curious
how love could bloom—
from silence.

We saw forever
in a sea of daisies
our backs to the world
shoulders brushing like fragile vows
we dared not speak aloud.
You—
with a heart too quiet
Me—
with one too loud.

And when the sea called
we sat by the edge
on cracked teal concrete
watching ships go by
not chasing them—
just wondering if they carried
the versions of us
who never said goodbye.

Behind brick and bloom,
we hid from the world
but not from each other
Your head touched mine—
so softly,
it rewrote every ache
I thought I had to keep.
Your gaze was the garden
I forgot I deserved.

And if I could choose again,
I'd still be the black night
to your gentle dawn—
not perfect, not always kind,
but always
always,
there.



Erennwrites
 Jul 14 Rubyredheart
dread
held
 Jul 14 Rubyredheart
dread
The last one
keeps being the hardest,
like if somehow this night
were the darkest

but I'm smiling,
I'm singing,
aren't we happy

I guess, it's just a mess,
and I must be wrong,
could you really let go

because I really couldn't
not for a lifetime and the next
and now
when I think, I dream

it's all just you and me.
 Jul 14 Rubyredheart
dread
Quit
 Jul 14 Rubyredheart
dread
It's all the same night, except for the background of getting worse,
I don't need to be understood,
but I don't want to end up in a hearse,
keep the period away, grant me further ellipses,
allow me to dream of her eyes, and how her lips kiss,

I've set the bar low, is what they say,
and allowed myself to **** off the feeling of dismay,
cannot see that I am burned while loving the sun's hottest rays,
sun bathing in an urn, keeping peace rather than being betrayed,
burnt to a crisp being the secret to bewray,

Midnight is the moon, and classic reverie,
a wishing and wanting like a fountain,
washing in my ears like an ocean I need not fear,
but it's quiet, when your company is only dead things,
grasping for life until you remember its sting,

Ultimately alchemical, and unfinished,
varnished by an unseeming finish,
fingers snapping at the air with no supernal intervention,
no cosmic charade or visual parade,
it just, ironically, ends.
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