Image by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Arnaud Mariat
Starlight Stitches
In the galaxies pooling in the waiting room
where black holes hum the prelude
to creation
we chart the shushed diagnosis
embossed in the orbit of
the body’s forgotten comets.
A neon billboard blinks
across the expanse of our silence.
I parse the Morse code of your breath
across the nebula each sigh
a collapsing star, giving way to the formation
of new worlds within the black hole’s void
We do not speak; our language lost
in the translation
from heartbeat
to heartbeat, a melody
brewing in the vacuum,
waiting for the moment to explode
into a thousand dawns.
Your hand, a continent adrift, finds mine
marked by the erosion
of countless parting fingertips that etch rivers
down the valley where our longing
meets its delta
and begins anew.
Beneath the snakeskin, my stories hum
within my bones, every journey
towards and away from you,
a cartography of scars mapping the routes
where I’ve searched
for the seam
that stitches the night to the day.
Here, our presence is a defiance
against the entropy that seeks to disperse
our fingertips to render us apart and alone
in winter’s expanding universe.
In the cosmos, where matter and meaning meld
we discover the architecture of a bridge
built from the cinders of dying stars
a path back to the singularity
from which all things sprang.
We are starfarers navigating the cosmos
without a compass guided
by the constellations
scattered across our interlocked hands.
A Collection
A green-cased novel
slivered the librarian’s mundane vast emerald sea of books.
Adjacent lies another,
a find from a lazy Sunday market,
its pages yellowed—a collection
not planned, but birthed:
an homage to aged parchment.
Like ivy climbing a forgotten wall, the collection grew until the shelf bowed.
When does a collection become a hoard?
When a passion morphs into an obsession—
The rushed turning of leaves
in a room still with anticipation,
where outside, the world whirls in chaos.
Enough is enough—whispered the pages; perhaps,
when the stories no longer sing but scream—
when the space for new tales
dwindles to a narrow sliver.
But for now, it stands, threatening to collapse under the weight
of muzzled stories and marred dreams.
Moment Lost
after E. E. Cummings “l(a, A Leaf Falls with Loneliness”
I tread lightly, fear wrapped in silence around me,
like an autumn leaf on the cusp of falling
as death casts its long, unmoving shadow.
Surrounding me is your curtain of indifference
— not just a veil but a fortress, impenetrable and cold,
teaching me what it means to be alone in a crowded room.
This indifference, a silent violence
— an erasure not of body, but soul, squeezing the breath
from my lungs until my spirit yearns for release. But a day approaches
—a turning of tides, where my cares dissolve into the aether,
and I shall no longer mimic the leaf succumbing to autumn's call.
In that moment of liberation, I wonder
if curiosity will finally stir within you.
When my presence is a whisper
you strain to hear in the wind, will you wonder
— is it possible, after all, to catch a falling leaf?
Or will you realize, in rue, the weight of a moment lost?