We're not together,

but write the more lovingly --


'You're so dear to me!'

Somewhere, in a field of static snow,
a violin lies unplayed,
its strings breathing the hushed tension
of storms caught between clouds.
The bow, discarded, angles like a broken wing
bent under a sky so gravid with noise
it forgets to weep.

Each string hums an unspoken question:
Why does silence gather such gravity?
The wood remembers a hand
that carved hymns from the void,
its grain bearing witness
to the weight of creation.

I watch from afar,
a shadow swallowed by dusk,
where soundless specters rise
from the soil's yawning absence.
Their mouths are mirrors,
reflecting only the things
we dare not say aloud.

Once, I held the bow myself,
my breath the metronome of eternity.
Each note spilled from my trembling hands
like the lifeblood of gods
we did not mean to summon.
Their voices still echo,
fragile filigrees caught
in the harp of my ribs.

Now, even my shadow refuses me.
The light fractures around it,
falling into the fissures
between longing and despair.
Still, the violin waits,
its patience the only hymn
worth singing.

I bend to pick it up—
the silence shatters.
Each shard catches the light,
spinning a constellation
of unplayed songs.

And in the final note,
a blade of sound cuts through me,
splitting marrow from bone,
memory from dream.
The echo hangs like a question
only the dead might answer,
and I am left to wonder
if it was ever meant to be played at all.

I draw maps on the inside of my skin,  
inked in the color of vanishing.  
Here lies the boundary of what was ours,  
eroded by the tide of unspoken.  
The compass spins, untethered,  
its needle trembling toward absence.  

Do you hear the silence?  
It is not quiet—  
it claws at the air,  
each gasp a hymn to what’s been torn.  
The walls hum with the echoes of us,  
a dissonant symphony,  
the architecture of breaking.  

You left your shadow folded neatly,  
tucked in the corner of my ribcage.  
I wear it like a second heart,  
beating out of time,  
a phantom rhythm that sways  
to the cadence of your departure.  

The sky is a wound tonight,  
its dark edges stitched with stars,  
each pinprick of light  
a question I can’t stop asking.  
The moon doesn’t answer,  
its face turned away,  
familiar as grief, distant as god.  

And what of the map I made for you?  
You’ve burned it—  
I smell the ashes in my dreams,  
see the charred remains in the curve of my palm.  
Still, my fingers trace the routes,  
as if I might find you  
in the spaces between now and never,  
as if I might follow the lines  
to the horizon where
You  
and this world  
could have coexisted.

-                                        I've spent so many hours
                                         underneath this sky,
                                                         Lamenting,
        The days between pass by me
         one by one, ah,
         Unrelenting,
                      They've all been the same,
                                       You see,
                Since you left this world behind,
      But I look for you in the starlight,
                    As your voice plays in my mind.

I tried to write you down,  
to cage your shape in syllables  
and carve your voice into stone—  
but you fell through the spaces between the words,  
your presence an ache I could not name.  

You were the shadow  
cast by light too bright to see,  
the ripple left by a hand  
reaching for water but finding air.  

I am tethered to what is not,  
chasing the echo of an echo,  
a whisper that refuses to rest.  
You linger where thought dissolves,  
where memory curls in on itself,  
a Möbius of longing.  

If I could grasp you,  
trace the edges of your form,  
I would not.  
You are not meant to be held,  
only felt in the hollow  
you carved into my being.  

And when I speak your name,  
it splinters—  
a sound too heavy for breath,  
too light to fall.

~
Unusual and cloudless

This slippery world

Today is still contagious

Here is heat, here is rain

Here is love, regardless

Shadows in the scaffolding

Look like a broken alphabet

The sun in its anger

Just won't set

Life and how to do it

Perfectly absent
~