I was born blank
a silence so wide it could swallow your name
before it ever left your mouth.
But then you came.
With shaking hands,
and ink that bled like memory.

You never introduced yourself.
Didn’t need to.
I knew you.
From the pauses between your lines,
from the weight of what you never wrote.
I felt you in every crossed-out word,
each accidental truth that spilled
before you could censor it.

They call me tool.
Instrument.
Stationery.
But I am anything but still.
Each stroke a confession,
each sentence a scream you whispered to me
because the world was too loud
or too cruel
to hear it.

I’ve tasted apologies
you couldn’t speak aloud.
Fantasies you’d never live.
Rage you feared would ruin you.
And love… so much love…
it shook my spine
as the ink curved its soft syllables
like a lovers name
spoken at a funeral.

I am the graveyard
of every version of you
you tried to bury.
I am the echo
of all the things
you dared to say
only when no one was listening.

Still,
you leave me in drawers,
drop me in bags,
forget me for months
until sorrow brings you back.
And I never mind.
I never mind.

Because I don’t need your thanks…
just your truth.

And when your hand trembles again,
I’ll be ready.
To carry the weight
you can’t bear alone.
To bleed,
so you don’t have to.

How human it is to speak with a drawl
to define and expound and interpret it all,
naming objects and assigning a label
placing a meaning and fixing it stable.

Is it really that thing that we named, overweening
or is it's existence outside of our meaning.
A teacup exists in a ritual of convention
a utilitarian Chinese invention.

But it's also a collection of bone dust and clay
the function transforming the substance this way,
the matter and molecule existed before
and after it's broken it's bone dust once more.

We build a construction of nouns in our head,
the meaning assigns a convenient "instead"
As the vessel returns to it's matter
language and labels and meaning will scatter.

Impermanence is both fickle and cruel
but in a grand triumph of human renewal.
we impose hope in our order once more
pretending that chaos bends to our lore.

All things are still lives

in themselves, unpretentious --


what they are there for.

There is your laundry,

which I will clean, but for whom?


Will someone wear it?

The tuba stays here,

I can't play it anymore --


this very last time.

(a thought rendered as a Senryu poem string)

A thought - proffered
by a jackal of a boy
that I dislike.

Has stayed with me
with an irritating,
cold dissonance.

For several days
- I’ve been turning it over
- somehow, it rings true.

“All romance aside,
in the long run, we must be
mutual *** objects.”

The shower curtains gets stuck to my
leg as if it knows I need to feel a
comforting touch.
The kettle steams my glasses
and gifts my eyes a rest.
At night the fan whirrs and rotates
as if scanning the rooms for threats.

Living alone isn’t as lonely
as you might think.

these are the things that fall,

an apple,
some leaves,
droplets of rain,
and then of tears.

almost all heavy objects,
(including) my sleepy eyes.
the sun at the close of day.
the stars on a dark sky.

the sky,

and my heart, for the only thing that didn’t (fall), your heart.