If the ghosts are tugging too hard
if the night is biting at your ribs
I will stack pillows
like sandbags
and build trenches out of sheets—
I will catch you.

If you need a slow honey embrace
let the night fall around us—
in bursts of burnt orange
and hazy purple
I will trace 'Calliope' on your bare back
catch you where the dark softens.

If you need—
I will leave weapons
and blades at the door,
become your open palms—
I will catch you.

Tribute to Sable Nocturne’s poem « The Quiet Becoming» and Maria’s poem «My Loneliness.»
Note below.


I wake inside a dream—
not to a place, not to a time,
but to something so different—
No images, no faces,
only the swell of a feeling,
as if my ribs have cracked open
to let me slip deeper.

It is neither loss nor desire,
not grief, not joy—
but the raw ache of existence,
of having once been held,
and now, reaching.

I wake twice—
once from the dream,
and then again
to the world.

The wind brushes my skin.
A sound beyond the window—
a bird calling from a nest,
for the sun’s soft warmth.

And in the quiet,
this feeling returning,
this echo,
as if it has waited for me
all this time—

A calm and loving reminder—
hiding behind loneliness.

To love. To be loved.
To be lifted into warm arms,
to be something soft
inside another’s hands—
safe, unforgotten.

The feeling stays with me now,
bare as first light,
as if it has never left me—
as if I have been dreaming it
all along but calling it loneliness.

«What  is  love?»   the   bookkeeper  asked,   with  a voice
measured  as  if  he  were  cataloging  new  books  among
his neatly stacked shelves.

I peered  out  the  window,  where  the  park  sat  patiently
beneath the faint light  of evening.  A single  bench  rested
under an old oak tree,  its wooden slats  worn  from years
of wear.  «Love is an empty bench,» I said.

He frowned, the words catching in his mind like unshelved
books placed in the wrong order. «Why empty?»

I turned back and offered him a smile.

«Love is not in the  emptiness  the bench endures,»  I said,
«but in the fullness, it knows, even when no one sits there.»

The bookkeeper did  not  respond  right  away.  Instead,  his
eyes drifted past me to the world beyond his books, beyond
the comfort of ink and paper.

And for a moment, I wondered if he,  too,  was thinking of a
bench once filled—of someone who sat beside him, someone
he knew long ago.