the absence of lamplight reveals the world behind
the usually covered french doors;
as the world becomes darker the sky glows purple
an eerie bruise
frozen into being.
streetlights and porchlights add their own interpretations
on how trees should be covered
and the pines, green in daylight
turn into purple, black, green and orange towers
hiding the hospital below
which shares their transformation with the light from the apartments

I never noticed the house
Growing smaller in the distance
In my happy haze I frolicked away
All the while ignoring my minds quiet insistence
It wasn't until I began to sway
That I heard what my mind
Was trying to say
Don’t stray too far from the comforts of home
But I had not heard
I wanted to roam
I flew through the field
Like a bird
With my beautiful wings unfurled
But now my wondrous wings are broke
They were not mine to keep
My eyes well up and I start to choke
All alone in a field I weep
The road back home was much too steep
The porchlights turn on in that faraway house
I watch the silhouettes of people I once knew
Then look down at my tearstained blouse
Those people watched me as I grew
But now our time together is through
If only my wings were not broken
I could fly back to that far away house
If only I had listened to what my mind had spoken
I wouldn't be sitting in a lonely field frozen

Calloused palms on the dead wood plough,
he grunts with the crickets dirt gospel, dusk sweat.
Then the sky splits open with a metal psalm.

Metal birds scream overhead,
bronze-feathered beasts with furnace bellies,
speaking in static tongues no prophet yet decoded.

He jerks like a gun misfired,
heart skipping a jazzed-out rhythm
wheat bows like it's seen God.

Idols split at the seams.
The gods arrive, riveted and winged,
their eyes are cockpit glass and heat sensors.

He kneels—half-prayer, half glitch in the flesh—
mud to shin, mouth to silence.
Nothing in his century fits what he’s seen.

II.
Fast-forward: the hive hums neon,
What was once a god now is named “routine,”
tickets, scans, complaints about leg-room.
Miracles shrink when they fit a schedule.
(Little is it that you give thanks)

But up there
in those belly-bright fuselages—
300 private lives in one tube of light.
every fuselage is a vein of stories
pulses, heartbeats, eyelids,
toddlers squirming, someone giggling,
a couple passing one earbud back and forth,
thumbs tapping glass,
life or death.


That’s sonder:
the quiet gospel of shared altitude.
A whole choir of strangers
humming different midnights
under one aluminium ribcage.

III.
Now it’s me.
Marrow humming from an insomniac run
fog curling like steam off a cup.

The street is a mausoleum of streetlamps.
I only hear my echo.

Then—low and slow— (lo and behold)
a silver juggernaut moans above me, (I would rather a woman but you don't get what you want)
soft as a lullaby.

I can’t see the passengers, but I know they are there:
proof of civilization stitched above the clouds,
(a comforting thought)
somewhere between sleep and sky.

My blood syncs to the jet sound,
and it says:
you are not extinct yet.
(swaddle my heart in a duvet)

There are lovers, stanzas
staring down at the same small city
counting porchlights from the clouds.
Coffees are ordered at 30,000 feet upove the air (upove the air)

IV.
So I run (My running is now entranced)
ghost-guided by that mechanical moon,
For I know that there are indeed mechanical moons.

Grateful.
For thunder in the shape of miracles.
For farmers who once raised torches.

For the way we file awe under “daily departures,”
for every godless bird that still flies true,
and for the voice stitched into the smog saying:


We are still here.

A rusted spoon on the windowsill,
coffee ring stamped into cheap linoleum.
You hollow out the morning with your hands,
counting cracks in the pavement like prayers.

I never wanted the altar you made of me,
a bent spoon, a crumpled shirt, a late rent notice.
You press my name to the inside of your lip,
taste of pennies and burned toast, and call it faith.

When I leave the house stays small and cold,
the radiator clicking Morse about how you failed.
Your eyes become coin slots~only quarters fit,
only the exact change for another minute of me.

You sleep with my jacket on the floor,
its zipper still holding the shape of my breath.
Dried flowers in a jar on the dresser~petals like ash~
you water them with cigarette smoke and promises.

At three a.m. you whisper my address to the dark,
map the route by broken porchlights and one working stoplamp.
A bus sighs by; a dog barks and then forgets.
You trade your teeth for another swallow of me.

You barter trust for a paper bag, a folded bill,
your father’s watch, a photograph with the face cut out.
When the fix arrives it’s clinical~cold metal, a light~
and you flinch, surprised that salvation tastes like copper.

Later, you sit with your palms full of lint
and call it worship. I am the sermon you cannot keep,
and you kneel on a kitchen floor that remembers rain
and smells like old milk and the sound of the phone you never answer.

You call me love.
I answer in the echo of a slammed door,
in the way the curtains never learn to hang straight again,
in the slow, patient theft of everything you were.