We are not the same.
Look to your wrists,
Look to your ankles,
If what you search for are manacles.
You who claim I wear chains,
Who seek to shackle my spouse
Because you refuse to embrace your existence.
I am not bound,
For I am freedom.
And, in that way,
I grant you the same thing.

icarus 6.29.25 (4:00 pm / 16:00)
i, too
want to fly so close to the sun
that i become ashes
and when i am dead
then i will smile and laugh

and i will be happy

as i drift
as dust
into s p a c e

What is hunted for?
For who is searched for?
What is sought?

From nature: knowledge - compassion.

From the cosmos: companions - patience.

From the savagery which birthed civility;
From the meek,
I made strong.

I who go on.

I choose to pass-on,
To divide my belongings to those most deserving.
I who will work with others,
And in that way - do for them.
But never by force,
Through any medium & by any method
Of which that takes shape & form.

For even space is occupied,
There is both foreground & background.
That which is visible
And that which is elusive.

Like vapor from water forming clouds.
Like gaseous vents expelling
What can not be seen, but felt.

All is & all is connected.

They speak of absence & inaction -
Yet, 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩,
¹ Such things do not exist.
Like imbalance,
These are merely perspectives.

. (or: the slow mercy of being forgotten) .

I keep the lights dim now—
not out of mood,
but because shadows are gentler
when you no longer belong to the future.

The watch still doesn’t tick.
I wear it anyway.
Not to remember time,
but to remind myself I once commanded it.

His coat is still here,
draped over the back of the chair
like an exhale that forgot to finish.

Some nights I sleep beside it.
It doesn’t smell like him anymore.

I replay our first conversation like a hymn
missing half its words.
I remember what I said.
I don’t remember if I meant it.

The bed is quieter than it should be.
Not empty—just echoing
with choices I let make themselves.

I heard he’s moved on.
Young lover, new city,
same crooked smile
twisting someone else’s orbit.

And good.
Let him become legend
in someone else's story.
I already built a temple
he burned into blueprint.

I tried to write him a letter once.
It became a list.
Then a poem.
Then silence.

I left it unfinished.
Some things are meant to haunt,
not conclude.

There’s a thunderstorm tonight.
I sit by the window with a glass of nothing
and watch the sky argue with itself.

For a second,
the lightning looks like him.

And for the briefest flicker—
just long enough to ache—

I believe I was loved.

{fin}

When one withholds their perspective,
This is the most sour grape.
That is like wine gone bad,
Caustic & acidic.
Destructive to the natural flow
Of the great amphoras.

They call them crocodile tears
When animals muddy the waters
By disturbing silt or dirt
And thereby obscuring/obstructing
What is otherwise a clear view.
As like pouring wine into a cup of water.

. (Mythology Re-Imagined As Fairy-Tale & Deconstructed) .

No one recalls when he arrived.
He was already there, in the corners of high rooms.
Carried in on wind or instinct.
Too composed to belong, too still to be ignored.

He wasn't from the sea, though he stared at it often.
Stared like a man who missed something he never touched.
He lived above things—above feeling, above endings.
He wore distance like other men wear charm.

And she—well.
She wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

---

They said she’d been sealed beneath water before time had a name.
Not drowned. Not sleeping.
Just paused.

A beauty left half-sketched.
A song trapped on the bridge, never reaching the chorus.
She existed in the almost.
The kind of presence that ruins men who believe in silence.

No one put her there.
But something had.
Something old and silver-lipped, a clockmaker with no face.

---

When he found out, he didn’t shout.
Didn’t storm.
Storms are for men who want to be heard.

He simply started unmaking himself.

Small things, at first:

Giving away secrets he never told.

Letting starlight fall from his shoulders like ash.

Standing in rooms long enough for people to forget he was tall.

Eventually, he gave away the last thing he had—
the part of him that never wanted anything.

And that was enough.

---

She came back like foam curling over marble.
Not as a lover. Not as a reward.
As weather.

She passed him by.

Looked at the space he’d vacated inside himself
and nodded, as if to say: “Yes. That will do.”

---

After that, things changed.

She walked through the city like someone who could end it.
Touched doorframes and left them trembling.
Spoke only when the sentence would shatter something.

He, on the other hand,
was seen less and less.
Not gone—just thinned out, like smoke after a gunshot.

---

Some say he became the silence in her laugh.
Others claim he left, unfinished, like a poem crumpled in a lover’s pocket.
No one’s sure.

But if you ask the sea just right—
after midnight, after mirrors—
you’ll hear it whisper:

“He let go of the sky, so she could walk through it.”

{fin}