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don’t
 touch me.
not because
  i break,
but because
  i forget
    where i end.


your hand
  doesn’t hurt.
but it
    shifts
  the lines
    between skin
      and silence.


i want
 to be
  held,
    but not taken.

i want
     the warmth
      without the aftersound.


when you
  touch,
    i disappear
      into the outline
        of your want.


i reach back
  not to stop
    but to
      delay.

to fold
  the moment
    before it
      becomes
        mine.


touch me
  but only
    as question.

never
  as name.



 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 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.
 Jul 13 Rubyredheart
Malcolm
Moments drift and pass
thoughts engrained in time
dreams nest within our hearts,
eternal forever alive.

Echoes linger still
shadows soft on souls,
whispers of laughter lost,
tears never told.

Time may steal the day,
but cannot steal the spark
love once truly felt,
still burning in the dark.

For every fleeting hour
leaves fingerprints behind,
on memories gently worn,
but never left behind.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
July 2025
Moments
 Jul 5 Rubyredheart
Ma'ya
Fallen cherry blooms,
Sticks to my wet skin like grief,
Brief and hard to hold.
Buds along the branch,
Closed and holding on to spring,
I hold on to you.
 Jun 28 Rubyredheart
Malcolm
Words come from the distant deep,
where silence hums and secrets sleep.
Thoughts that flicker, wild or meek,
drip like rain from the soul's dark beak.

They rise from marrow, not from air,
from bloodied dreams or whispered prayer.
Sometimes steep, a summit scream,
sometimes soft as a lullaby dream.

They ride on crows with razored wings,
or butterflies with silver strings.
Some arrive like axe-blade sighs,
some as tears in a child’s wide eyes.

They are born beneath the skin,
in quiet wars we hold within.
Lines crawl out through open scars,
stanzas shaped like fallen stars.

Married in unison — pulse and page,
they outlive time, they outgrow age.
A poem doesn’t end — it loops, it plays,
it’s sung through moonlight and firelit days.

Words don’t rot, they bloom and bite,
etched in ink or screamed at night.
They are rivers of chocolate, or ******-red,
they live when we are long past dead.

So write — with truth, with flame, with breath,
for poems cheat both time and death.
They touch the places no one sees,
they plant forever in the breeze.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
June 2025
Where Poems Are Born
 Jun 27 Rubyredheart
Zywa
I promise you
not to build mountains of gold
on weak ground, I promise you
no lifelong love
out of blind lust

I promise you
no great deeds
but sincere ones
to do what I can
to be who I am

that is: your
wisdom when you're angry
defence wall around your fear
hand under your head
nest for your sorrow

I am your
understanding answer
mountain with a view
double joy
and other side

I am your
well-doing bath
together at the table
bed to sleep in
love to your toes
In August 2011 Thijs Zonneveld published on the news site nu.nl the column "That mountain will be built" about building a 2 km high mountain in Flevoland; the idea was abandoned in 2015-2016

Collection "The Big Secret"
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