Poems
Literature as a way of understanding survival.
What the Body Remembers
Touch me
like I am both question and answer.
Like your hands have wandered the deserts of doubt
and finally found something worth believing in.
Do not rush.
Time has never been the master of truth.
Let each moment unfurl
as if eternity is hiding
between the curve of my hip
and the hush of your breath.
My skin is not just skin.
It is memory.
It is a scripture
written in nerve and ache,
waiting to be read
by someone who understands
that pleasure is not the opposite of depth
but a passage to it.
What is the soul
if not the body
made aware of itself?
What is love
if not the art
of being fully here
present,
unafraid,
and undone
in the gaze of another
who dares to stay?
Do not seek to possess me.
I am not yours.
But I will open like the sky
to anyone
who sees the storm and stays.
Because in the end,
we are all just
souls searching for mirrors—
and bodies
searching for proof
that we were ever real at all.
Lantern Bones
I carry a lantern made of bone,
stitched with shadows,
lit by the fragments
of who I used to be.
The night is thick with silence,
not absence,
but the kind that hums
with unanswered questions.
I walk through old rooms
of my memory,
where echoes sit in corners
like forgotten prayers.
I trace the outline
of someone I almost became
a flicker in the fog,
a breath I didn't take.
If I find her,
will she recognize me?
Will we speak in mirrors,
or mourn what was lost
between becoming and survival?
I do not know
Still,
I wander.
Lantern held high.
Looking.
Token
I see in his eyes
the need to be clear
like the water
The rocks below:
red, green, brown
wound, rough, sharp.
He wishes to be taken
home,
loved,
to belong with the tokens
of pleasure, peace, joy
to be among them,
clearly noticed,
wanted,
a memory
of times
sweet and long.
He is lost,
unnoticed,
overlooked,
changed and painted,
painted
to be something better,
something smoother.
Powder around the sharp edges,
edges that shift the surface,
ripple the smoothness,
the flatness of water,
and strip its clarity
Bringing illusion
to the surface,
to protect
what's underneath
He doesn't see
the depth
of his own pits,
how the water flows through strong,
how the world
can see more clearly
because he isn't flat,
or round
because he doesn't
blend in unnoticed.
He is eroded,
boldly rough
boldly rough,
making deceptions,
awareness,
questions reality,
changing.
