If I weren't me, who would I be?
If the world hadn't shut down, would I still
be lost?
Like blisters on my feet, I carry my doubts,
Mistook burnout for discipline, wore it as
a badge.

Baggage heavy with memories,
I drag it through the mud-
Versions of myself, deeply buried in a suitcase.

If I stop and leave it behind,
Will the old me burn in ashes?

Terraces, people, smoke
rising above their heads,
all of them hiding talks
in the so-needed shade.

Everyone's outside,
interior's empty, but
i think i will go inside,
into the silent gut

of this cafe that i have
been to so many times.
It's seen me when things were rough,
granted it's seen my smiles.

Two weeks left until again
the calendar sheds a year.
The volatility of Men
forces the eye to tear.

Twenty-two, although not much,
is more than i've ever been,
and it seems my time tries to catch
up to the time after me.

What is it that i feel?
hard to tell, stillness perhaps,
but pinned down with barren fear.
But had i another chance

to choose what i could've been,
with all of my blunders in sight,
i still would have chosen me
and still would have come inside.

Having been safely tucked
into the sleeve of my congenital distortion,
i do my time at mercy of today's luck
but still consist of yesterday's misfortune.

O, that time
     were an hourglass.
   Each moment with you,
     a grain of sand,

       falling, rising,
        down and up,
         up and down.

          Relived.
          Refilled.

          I wish,
     that would be my life.

The memory of leaves heals me, but first I had to detonate the emptiness in my mother's gaze. Today this me summons all dreams for a clinical examination. Life must move forward to the confrontation of  horizontal and vertical truths: the tenderness of growing wheat, the serenade of aging. The innocence of my hands denounces its longevity. I split my days in two: countable and uncountable or dreaming and nondreaming. I suffer this continuous birth:  words invent me like an age without history. It must be said though: a historical smoke comes out of them. On a day like this beauty is tough, I speak with a seemingly exiled tongue. No return for dreams disguised in blind storcks.
When I look around I see all the way to New York or Cape Town how this world is oppressed by an aboundand impatience to find the point of no return for the sea level. I see the future where I never existed. Our own shadows crush us but we blame it on the sun's karma. I blame everything on love's echo.

052625

It rained.
The sky trembled,
and so did I—
waking in the hush of lateness,
a body unraveling in silence.
Illness came not like thunder,
but like memory—
quiet and overdue.

Weeks ago,
voices too young to understand
asked me things I couldn’t answer.
I smiled.
But something inside
went missing.
So I closed the door
before the next knock.
I named it fear,
but maybe it was a kind of vanishing—
the way I’ve always slipped through
before connection could tether me.

Trust—
a thin, brittle bridge
between islands.
I walked it once.
Now I float
in my own weather.

I thought
I was finished breaking.
That the years had made me whole.
But strength is not stillness.
And even stone remembers
how to fall.

There were worries
I tore from my own hands,
pages I left blank
so no one could read me.
And yet—
this morning,
I unwrapped something fragile
I had wrapped in forgetting.

And it was me.
Still here.
Still trying to become.

But what if the world ends tomorrow?
All the things left unsaid
All the kisses never given
All the moments never shared—
Where will they go?
Will they hover in the air
In the stagnant debris
Of a world ended?
All the things we held back
When we thought we had
All the time in the world
Will float aimlessly
Waiting for a place to land
But there is no place to land
For the world has ended
There is nowhere left to go

If I wait to say I love you
I might wake up one morning
And find you’re no longer there
And the flowers hidden in my closet
Will have nowhere to go
And if I wait to say I’m sorry
You might never know
And if the world ends tomorrow,
You might never hold me again
What if we kissed for the last time?
What if the last words we said
Echo through a lost eternity?
I would rather have made a million mistakes
Than stand in black
Holding a rose you never saw

Why are we drawn
to lust,
to the hunger of flesh,
to devour food
as if the body remembers
a hunger older than time?

Because we are soil!
And we desire
grain,
flesh,
which too rise
from soil.

Like calls to like.
Atoms seek atoms.

The universe obeys
its own silent gravity.

Our lust,
and longings
die
when we return
to the dust
we came from.
But even then,
it’s not over.

Our atoms will scatter
into soil,
into seeds,
into skins.

And somewhere,
in someone,
they will long
again.
Not with our name,
but with our echo.

Maybe, the bodies you see
are echoes,
of echoes,
of echoes...
of echoes…
…
..
.