Water holds no loyalties to memory.
It will swallow your name whole,
Churn it into a language
Only stones can decipher,
Then spit it out as foam—
A frothy eulogy
No one asked for.
It moves like betrayal dressed in silk,
Soft to the touch
But sharp enough to carve bones into weapons.
Do not mistake its stillness for mercy.
Even in its quiet,
It dreams of drowning cities
And filling lungs with liquid sermons.
Water does not mourn.
It erases.
It is the great unmaker,
Pulling the faces of lovers,
The hands of mothers,
And the footprints of gods
Into its endless, churning womb.
I’ve seen it carry grief like a crown,
Rivers wearing the ashes of cathedrals
And the charred wood of promises
As though they were jewels.
And yet, it forgets.
It will forget you,
Just as it forgot the mountains that once knelt to it,
Just as it forgot the villages
That tried to tame its chaos.
Drink from it if you dare.
It will not quench your thirst;
It will bloom in your throat,
A garden of salt and regret,
Each drop a seed of storms.
Even the sky cannot hold it.
When water falls,
It claws its way back to the earth,
Filling every crack with its liquid hunger.
It breaks its mirrors on the surface,
Each shard a fractured memory
It refuses to keep.
It whispers,
But it never listens.
You could spill your secrets into it,
And it would carry them away
Not as treasures, but as burdens.
It does not care.
It has no need for your pain.
Water is the poet of forgetting,
Writing its verses on the soft shores of time,
Then dragging the sand away grain by grain
Until no trace remains.
It cannot love you.
It cannot hate you.
It only exists to move forward,
Always forward,
Toward an ocean that never knew your name.
