You are not the first to stand here,
shifting your weight from heel to toe,
listening for something that won’t answer.

This was someone’s altar once—
iron-veined and humming,
burning red under the weight of hands
that bent it to their will,
knuckles split and salted,
prayers exhaled through gritted teeth.

They worked like men who had no choice,
backs arched into the shape of tomorrow,
sleeves rolled past their elbows,
skin browned with the kind of sweat
that never washes off,
that seeps into the ground
like blood, like proof.

You were born too late to know them,
but their bones remember you.

You carry their names in pieces:
a slanted initial in your passport,
a jawline that sharpens the same way,
a craving for salt, for silence,
for anything that lingers—
but never long enough.

Time has worn them down
to a Sunday ghost,
a muttered grace before supper,
a name no one says right,
a thing you promise to remember
but never write down.

The rails are rusting,
but still they hold.
The ties are rotting,
but still they grip the earth.
The past is splintering,
but still it snags your skin.

You wonder if their hands ever ached
the way yours do,
or if the ache was different—
deeper, heavier,
rooted in something you can’t name.

You wonder if they knew
they were building a road
no one would walk back down.

And you wonder if they’d still have done it,
knowing they would fade into dust
long before you came looking,

long before you ever thought to ask,
before the rust reached the marrow,
before their prayers turned to silence,
before you let their stories slip
like sand through your teeth.

In the hollow where gears no longer grind,
a machine dreams, rusting in its stillness—
each cog a cathedral of forgotten motion,
each bolt a hymn to the violence of purpose.

It once devoured silence,
crushing it beneath the weight of its song,
an engine that mapped the tremors of time
in spirals of smoke and steel.

Now it whispers to the dust,
its voice a brittle thing,
like wind caught between
the ribs of a shipwreck.

Once, it drank light,
spinning photons into meaning,
spitting stars from its teeth—
but entropy comes as a thief,
gentle in its theft,
unthreading the tapestry of will.

This is the prayer of the obsolete:
not for salvation, but for witness,
for the sparrows that roost in its hollows,
their claws etching eulogies
into the flaking paint.

If you press your ear to its frozen heart,
you will hear the echoes of a once-throbbing world:
the gasp of pistons,
the sigh of levers,
the pulse of a century spilling forward,
greedy for what lay beyond the horizon.

But what it built, it cannot name—
only the faint impression remains,
like the shadow left by a hand
long lifted from a wall.

To live is to be made
and unmade.
To endure is to surrender
to the quiet art of decay.

In its silence, the machine waits,
not for revival,
but for the soft forgiveness
of rust.

And when it falls,
scattered into earth,
the ground will hum
with the memory of its weight.

Dust had long settled on that heart,
It barely works and full of rust,
Though it was only used once
After a misery it was
Thrown aside like a trash;
It is an antique with no value
And never would have one
No matter how much time passes—
A piece that would stay on the shelf
Until it crumble into dust.

They built a lighthouse,
to warn the ships.
The ships transported the sea.
You professed your love,
with living lips.
Your lips spoke words that buried me.

Tanker ships containing water,
run aground upon the sand.
A human being becomes a monster,
by another human's hand.

The future dies within.
The past is always evaporating.

As the tanker rusts,
so I also must,
until we are but two derelict husks,
filled with nothing but regret.

Once, here was the sea,
voluminous and wet!
Once, I was me,
until the day we met.