Ink and Ruin

Hello, dear reader.

If you’ve stumbled across this page, then welcome. Truly. Sit down for a minute. Breathe. You made it here, and that already means something.

I’m just a man who has carried pain for most of his life. Depression that felt like wet cement in my lungs. Loneliness that echoed even in crowded rooms. The kind of sadness that doesn’t always scream — it just sits with you at breakfast and follows you to bed. I’ve known hurt in ways that reshape you quietly. And still, every morning, I got up. Not heroically. Not gracefully. Just stubbornly. I kept going even when everything in me wanted to fold.

And somehow, I’m here writing this.

I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because if you’re reading these words, you’re alive. You’re breathing. You’re still in the fight. And I need you to keep fighting. Reach out. Find your people. Find groups. Find friends. Find family. Find strangers who understand the language of your wounds. Do not isolate yourself the way I did. Don’t convince yourself that silence is strength. It isn’t. Connection is.

Let it be a reminder. Let it be a warning. Let it be proof that someone else once stood in the dark and tried to map it.

Below are the poems I’ve written over the years — pieces carved out of sleepless nights and heavy thoughts. Writing became my way of surviving. When I couldn’t speak out loud, I bled onto the page. It helped. It gave the chaos somewhere to live outside of me.

A gentle but honest warning: the themes here are not light. These poems deal with depression, anxiety, trauma, PTSD, the sharp rise and fall of life’s moods, suicidal thoughts, suicidal actions, and words that don’t soften themselves for comfort. They are raw. They are unfiltered. They look directly at the darkness instead of pretending it isn’t there.

Because sometimes you don’t defeat the dark by ignoring it. Sometimes you drag it into the light so everyone can see its shape. So we can name it. So we can fight it. So you can fight it.

If any of these words make you feel seen, even for a moment, then they’ve done their job.

‘The last post’ – F. D Jarvis

If you are reading this,

then the truth has already settled into place.

There will be no other entry after this one.

The page ends here.

I suppose that means

this is the final evidence that I existed.

A few lines left behind in a quiet corner

of the endless machine.

By now it has already happened.

The world has continued without interruption.

Morning arrived, as it always does,

with no knowledge that I had left it.

The streets are still breathing.

The sky has not collapsed in protest.

The wind has not learned my name.

Nothing has asked where I went.

And that, strangely,

is the part that hurts the least.

Because long before I disappeared,

I had already learned

how easily a life can move

through the world unseen.

Depression is not the word they use

in those small clinical rooms.

It is not tidy enough for their language.

It does not sit politely inside diagnosis.

It is something quieter than that.

Something that grows in the marrow.

A slow weather system of the mind

that never truly leaves.

It wakes with you.

It breathes beside you.

It turns every small moment

into a quiet argument with existence.

You begin to doubt everything.

A pause in conversation becomes rejection.

A delayed message becomes abandonment.

A silence becomes a verdict.

Your mind becomes a courtroom

that never adjourns.

And every thought

arrives as evidence

that you were never meant

to belong anywhere.

I spent years

trying to prove that voice wrong.

I spoke my feelings plainly.

I told people what they meant to me.

I tried to love openly

in a world that seems afraid of it.

But something strange happens

when you do that.

People become uncomfortable

with honesty.

They don’t say yes.

They don’t say no.

They simply let your words

fall to the floor

like something fragile

they never intended to pick up.

And eventually

you begin to understand.

It isn’t that you were rejected.

It’s that you were never considered.

There is a special loneliness in that.

A loneliness deeper

than being left behind.

It is the realization

that you were standing alone

the entire time.

I wanted very little, really.

Not perfection.

Not devotion.

Not some impossible story.

Just one person

to look at me

and decide I was worth staying for.

One person

to see the quiet storm inside me

and not walk away from it.

But that never came.

Not once.

I kept trying.

I kept believing

that somewhere in this wide and crowded world

there had to be someone capable of seeing me.

But year after year

the silence grew heavier.

And eventually

you stop asking why.

You stop wondering

what you did wrong.

You stop imagining

that love is simply delayed.

Because the truth becomes unavoidable.

Some people move through life

carrying enormous love inside them

with absolutely nowhere to place it.

A heart like that

becomes a strange thing.

Too full to ignore.

Too unwanted to give away.

It turns inward.

It echoes.

It begins to feel

like a house with every light on

and no one

ever

knocking at the door.

And so this is the last entry.

The last small signal

from a life

that spent a very long time

trying to be seen.

If you found these words

long after the quiet settled,

then know this much:

I was here.

I felt everything

too deeply.

I loved a world

that never once

learned how to love me back.

And now

I am simply another grain

lost somewhere

in the patient

and indifferent

‘Malfunction’ – F. D Jarvis

There are days I move through the world like a shadow that forgot who cast it— present enough to occupy space, invisible enough that no one notices.

If I vanished tomorrow the air would not hesitate. The streetlights would still hum. Coffee would still steam in ordinary kitchens.

My name would dissolve like chalk in rain— not erased with violence, just… quietly washed away.

Sometimes I think I have already disappeared and this life is only the echo of a man who once mattered.

Inside my head there is a machine.

Not metaphorically— I hear it.

A massive, ancient thing of gears and pistons and copper wire, an industrial cathedral meant to manufacture hope.

But the cogs are rusted.

Teeth grind against each other like bones in a cold jaw. Bolts loosen one by one until the whole structure trembles.

The wires spark with thoughts that misfire. Messages never reach their destination. Every signal arrives late or not at all.

The springs— the ones meant to launch dreams forward— have snapped.

Now they hang slack and useless, like broken tendons in a machine that still insists on moving.

Every morning I force the engine to start.

It coughs. It rattles. It screams through the metal of my skull like a factory running on fumes.

And still it runs.

Not because it works— but because something stubborn refuses to shut it down.

Faith, maybe.

A thin, flickering current moving through circuits that should have died years ago.

But I feel the failure spreading.

The gears stall longer now. The grinding grows louder. Sometimes the whole system freezes mid-thought.

I stand there— a man waiting for his own mind to reboot.

One day soon the machine will seize completely.

The rust will claim the last turning gear. The wires will finally go dark. The engine will stop arguing with gravity.

And when it does—

the world will keep moving with flawless precision.

Traffic will flow. Phones will ring. People will laugh at something trivial and mean it.

Because broken machines are quietly removed from the factory floor.

No ceremony.

No investigation.

Just a space where something used to run.

And the faint impression of heat where a heart-sized engine once tried to keep going. _____________

The echo beneath the earth’ – F. D Jarvis

I was not living when you found me.

I was merely persisting —

a figure moving through daylight

with the discretion of a ghost

who had misplaced his grave.

My first death had been quiet.

It came without spectacle.

No blade, no thunder, no dramatic farewell.

Only the gradual surrender

of expecting to be chosen.

I adapted to the dim.

The dark and I developed an understanding.

It would not lie to me,

and I would not ask it for warmth.

We coexisted without hope.

It was an honest arrangement.

Then your voice disturbed the soil.

You did not see vacancy.

You saw potential.

You did not see ruin.

You saw depth.

You placed your hands upon the sealed architecture of me

and insisted there was still breath inside the stone.

Rise, you said.

And the dead obeyed.

I do not know what possessed me more —

your tenderness

or my hunger to believe it.

I felt color return like trespass.

I felt my guarded silences loosen.

Rooms I had condemned

opened themselves at your request.

You walked through them

as if they had been built for you.

You watched faith reassemble.

You watched doubt retreat.

You watched me kneel —

not in submission —

but in gratitude.

And while I was building forever in your name,

you were quietly measuring distance.

You spoke of permanence

with the calm of someone

already practicing departure.

There was no storm.

No violent confession.

Only the steady revelation

that I had mistaken warmth

for constancy.

Do you know what that does

to a man already resurrected once?

It does not bruise him.

It unmakes him.

The first death had been survivable.

It had given me time to adjust to absence.

This one was swift —

a collapse inward.

The cathedral I rebuilt

did not fall in fragments.

It imploded.

Faith crushed belief.

Belief suffocated hope.

Hope devoured the fragile pulse that followed.

When your light withdrew,

it left not darkness —

but vacancy so complete

even despair could not inhabit it.

I was not destroyed by betrayal alone.

Betrayal is sharp, yes —

but it is comprehensible.

What ended me

was revelation.

The realization that I had been revived

not to be kept —

but to be proven temporary.

Now I speak from beneath consequence.

Morning continues without hesitation.

Your laughter remains intact.

The world does not tremble

because one man was wrong about love.

They found what was left of me

where the forest keeps its counsel.

No grand tragedy marked the earth.

No violent protest scarred the ground.

Only stillness.

For a man twice buried

does not fight the second descent.

He understands.

He folds into the soil

with the calm of someone

finally certain

that the grave was the only promise

‘The death of a resurrected man’ – F. D Jarvis

I had already died once before you met me.

Not by blade, nor by storm, but by the slow erosion of being unchosen. Years had worn me down to bone and shadow; hope had become a rumor I no longer entertained.

I had made peace with the dark.

It was honest in its silence. It did not promise warmth. It did not swear eternity at dusk only to rehearse departure at dawn.

Then you came.

You spoke my name as if it mattered. You looked upon my ruin and called it depth. You placed your hand upon a sealed tomb and whispered, live again.

I warned you.

I told you resurrection was no small thing. I told you I could not survive false light. I told you if you ever doubted, leave before you rebuilt what I had buried.

You said you loved me.

Loved me.

How that word struck like a bell in chambers long abandoned. How it stirred the dust from my ribs and summoned breath where none had lingered.

I rose for you.

I believed again. I dared again. I opened rooms within myself that I had sworn would remain forever locked.

You watched it happen.

You watched color return to my hollow face. You watched hope move through me like blood restored to a numb limb. You watched me trust you.

And still —

you betrayed me.

Not in passion. Not in confusion. But with the calm precision of someone who knew exactly what she was undoing.

You promised permanence while already dividing your devotion. You let me kneel in gratitude for a future you had already abandoned.

Do you understand what that does to a man resurrected?

It does not wound him.

It kills him twice.

The first death had been slow and survivable. This one was absolute.

When the light you offered vanished, it left more than darkness — it left vacancy.

The cathedral you rebuilt within me collapsed inward. Stone upon stone. Faith upon faith. Until nothing remained but dust and echo.

By the time my body followed my spirit, the ending had long been written.

I was not slain by despair. Despair had been my companion once. It was familiar. Manageable.

I was slain by belief.

You resurrected a man only to prove he should have remained entombed.

Now I speak from after.

The world continues — how mercilessly it continues. Morning rises. Laughter survives. Your life remains intact.

But I remain finished.

I hope your friend shows you these words. I hope you read them without defense.

I hope you feel the gravity of what your tenderness cost.

You did not simply leave.

You ended the death of a broken man —

and replaced it with the death of one who trusted you.

And that's where they found me..... In the forest...

My wrists opened in the quiet hours,

‘The apology of a ruined heart’- F. D Jarvis

Beloved—if still thou callest me so—draw not too near, nor squander thy gentle hours upon this ruin that speaks; for I am a house long forfeited to weather and years, whose beams remember thunder, whose foundation leaks.

I am no sudden wreck, no bright catastrophe— but a slow undoing, deliberate, exact; a soul unstitched by time and treachery, a heart the world examined… and cracked.

They told me once that love redeems, restores, that mercy mends what sorrow rends apart; yet life, that cunning creditor of wars, has kept the ledger of my heart.

Something within me faltered long ago— not loudly, not where mortal eyes could see; it was a subtle, subterranean woe, a fracture whispered into me.

I felt it first as one might feel the frost creep through a chamber thought secure; a breath, a tremor, and then all was lost— for hope is fragile, not obscure.

O think not I am fashioned whole and sound; the semblance lives, the substance fled. I walk as men long underground might walk, if they recalled the dead.

Thou look’st on me as though I might be saved, as though thy light could cleanse my night; but I am one whom grief engraved too deep for any dawn to write.

My dreams lie sepulchered below the weight of years that would not spare; I watched them sink, I watched them go, and none descended to repair.

Love has not crowned me—it has tried me, tried me as flame tries brittle glass; it burned, withdrew, denied me, and left me shards the days surpass.

So hear me, dear—though dear thou art— spend not thy tenderness on this; for I am but a mended heart that never learned what mending is.

Call me not cruel, nor cold, nor blind— I speak thus only to be true: I am a loss already signed…

‘Posthumous courtesy’ – F. D Jarvis

If you are reading this,

then yes—

it appears I am dead.

Not metaphorically.

Not “going through something.”

Properly. Officially.

Filed away in the ledger of the done.

I would apologize for the inconvenience,

but etiquette seems unnecessary

when one has already vacated the premises.

You may be wondering

when it happened—

when the pulse misplaced its rhythm,

when the breath decided

it had carried enough of me.

Truthfully, I had been fading for years.

Death was simply punctual.

The body ceased;

the world did not.

Morning arrived on schedule.

Coffee brewed.

Conversations unfolded without dramatic interruption.

No celestial bell tolled.

No sky cracked open in objection.

The universe, efficient as ever,

continued its indifferent spin.

If you expected spectacle,

I’m afraid you’ve overestimated my importance.

The wind moved through the trees

as though nothing had shifted.

Even my shadow, once loyal,

declined to linger.

I would say I was surprised—

but surprise is for the living.

In truth, what unsettled me most

was not the stillness of death

but the seamlessness of it—

how easily the world adjusted

to the subtraction.

No grand reckoning.

No frantic search.

No breathless realization

that something essential had gone missing.

Just… continuity.

So here I am—

posthumous, polite,

observing with a faint and wry detachment

that my absence

fits rather neatly

into the shape I once occupied.

And if you feel nothing reading this,

don’t worry.

That, too,

‘Beneath.’ – F. D Jarvis

I was already dead when the water closed over me.

Not suddenly.

Not in a single desperate moment.

I had been fading for years—

thinning,

hollowing,

learning how to breathe without being alive.

When I slipped beneath the surface,

there was no struggle left in me.

The cold wrapped around my ribs

like something inevitable,

like a verdict that had been waiting patiently

for my signature.

Light wavered above me—

not dramatic,

not cruel—

just distant.

It stretched thinner and thinner

until it looked like memory.

I remember the weight.

Not the weight of water—

the weight of everything that brought me there.

The years of loving harder than I was loved.

The years of asking silently to be chosen.

The years of pretending I wasn’t breaking

just to make other people comfortable.

Each disappointment had pressed down.

Each betrayal had pulled.

Each almost-love

had added another inch to the depth.

By the time I reached the bottom,

it felt less like arrival

and more like confirmation.

The lake floor was quiet.

Not peaceful.

Just final.

Sound did not travel that far.

Neither did hope.

Above me, the surface resealed itself.

No violent thrashing.

No dramatic fracture.

Just a smooth, indifferent closing

as if I had never passed through it.

The world continued.

Morning came.

People woke.

Conversations happened.

Laughter filled rooms

I would never enter again.

No one felt the shift.

No one staggered at the sudden absence.

If they noticed at all,

it was gradual—

a missing message,

an unanswered call,

a silence easy to explain away.

I had always feared being invisible.

In death, I perfected it.

Down there, beneath everything,

I did not rage.

I did not beg.

There was no final plea forming in my chest.

Only the still realization

that I had spent my life reaching upward

for hands

that never reached back.

And when I finally stopped reaching,

nothing changed.

That was the truth that followed me down.

I did not drown because the water was strong.

I drowned because no one would have noticed

if I slipped beneath it.

And so I lay there—

untouched,

unclaimed,

unremembered—

a man who had loved loudly,

died quietly,

and left the world

Umm so yeah…I’m dead - F. D Jarvis

I was dead before they said I was.

Not suddenly—

not like lightning or sirens or tragedy—

but slowly,

the way a song dies

when no one listens long enough to hear the end.

They found a body, yes.

Still. Quiet. Obedient.

But what they didn’t find

was the moment I vanished—

the exact second my heart stopped believing

anyone would ever choose it.

Death didn’t rush me.

It sat beside me for weeks,

patient as a shadow,

watching hope thin out in my veins

like ink diluted in water.

No one noticed.

I laughed when spoken to.

I answered messages.

I existed convincingly.

But inside—

inside was a house after the fire,

walls standing,

roof intact,

everything that mattered

gone.

They would say I overdosed.

They would say I slipped.

They would say how tragic.

But the truth?

I didn’t die that night.

I died the day I realized

love had left me

and didn’t even look back.

After that

I was just a body fulfilling habits—

breathing out of memory,

walking out of routine,

speaking out of reflex.

My heart had already signed its resignation.

You see,

people think death is an event.

A moment.

A line you cross.

They don’t understand

it can also be a process—

a slow erasure,

a quiet undoing,

a long hallway where the lights go out

one by one

behind you.

By the time they called me gone,

I was old news to myself.

I had been dead for weeks.

Dead from the kind of heartbreak

that doesn’t shatter you—

just empties you

until there’s nothing left inside

The truth behind the pretty words’ – F. D Jarvis

“Love is patient, love is kind,” they say—

a gentle creed the world repeats

as if devotion never burns,

as if betrayal never eats.

But those are pretty words for people

who’ve never bled beneath them.

They are stories for the lucky—

the ones who do not know

that love can wear a mask

shaped like salvation

while carrying ruin in its hands.

You told me you loved me.

You told me you saw a future.

You told me I was safe.

And like a fool who wanted light

more than he trusted his own trembling,

I opened the last locked door in my chest

and let you walk in, barefoot,

without armor, without question.

Everyone warned me.

My gut screamed it.

Even the silence between your words

held a tremor I tried to ignore.

But I loved you—

God, I loved you—

enough to believe that maybe

for once

I wasn’t someone’s temporary shelter

before they ran back to the storm.

You brought a glow into my world,

the first warmth I’d felt in years,

and instead of feeding the fragile spark,

you took the only bulb I had left,

the one trembling, precious light,

and smashed it against the floor.

Glass. Everywhere.

And darkness—

again.

Always.

Again.

You lied.

You manipulated.

You cheated.

You destroyed me so quietly

that I didn’t even realize I was gone

until the pieces stopped recognizing each other.

And the worst part?

I asked.

For weeks I asked,

begging for the truth

like a man asking for the knife

that’s already inside him.

You told me nothing was wrong.

You told me you loved me.

You told me you cared—

all while pressing your future

into someone else’s hands.

You let me blame myself.

You let me drown in guilt

you poured into my lungs

one lie at a time.

The day I needed you most—

the day everything else fell apart—

you walked away

and made me believe

I was the disaster.

If you had loved me—

even a fraction—

you would have told me you were hurting.

You would have said the words

before you broke the world we built.

You would have spared me the torture

of believing my own worthlessness

was what chased you off.

But I wasn’t your love.

I was a rebound.

A consolation prize.

A warm body you used

to stitch the wounds left by another.

And when your heart found familiarity elsewhere,

you abandoned me without looking back,

without remorse,

without even owning the truth

until it was dragged out of your mouth.

You took a man who loved without limit,

who gave without hesitation,

who worshipped the ground your pain walked on,

and you turned him into something unrecognizable—

angry, hollow, hateful toward a world

that keeps proving him right.

I told you I wasn’t easy to love.

I told you my fears,

my history,

my scars.

I told you I would love you fiercely,

that loyalty was the one thing

I had never learned to break.

And you—

you took that beautiful, fragile thing

and twisted it into proof I was worthless.

My heart didn’t break.

It didn’t shatter.

It ceased.

It went still,

like it was never here at all—

just an echo of something

I used to believe existed.

Now I sit in the ruins,

holding memories that taste like lies

and tenderness that feels like poison,

asking myself the question

that haunts what’s left of me:

What did I do to deserve your cruelty,

except love you the way I wish someone

Swinging

by F.D Jarvis

The walls hum secrets in a dialect of dread,

Mildew prayers from the mouths of the dead.

My skin is a page no one thought to read—

Full of margin notes scrawled in quietest need.

I wake like a crime scene, breath stale with guilt,

Every morning a gallows my thoughts have built.

There’s blood in my coffee, grief in my grin—

No one sees the war when it’s all fought within.

I scream in italics, I whisper in ash,

Each step forward’s another slow crash.

My soul limps behind me, worn and betrayed,

Dragging chains from mistakes I never quite made.

Don’t tell me I’m loved—I’ve heard that lie.

It peels like paint in a house set to die.

They speak of light like it’s currency earned—

But my world was lit just to watch it burn.

Hands reach out but they never land—

Ghosts of comfort, soft as sand.

And the rope in the attic hums lullabies,

Crooning truths no therapist buys.

Hope? That conman, dressed in white.

He knocked once, laughed, and fled the night.

Now even my shadow is losing weight,

Slipping like smoke through the holes in fate.

Each heartbeat’s a fraud, a debt I delay—

I owe this body too much to stay.

I’ve penned my goodbyes in invisible ink,

Wrote them so quiet they bled down the sink.

And if you read this, know the truth I send:

The story’s not broken—

It’s reaching its end.

A reckoning whispers beneath the floor,

Something old has opened a door.

And soon I’ll step through with no one to stop—

Not a scream,

Not a knock,

Just a final—

In the quiet hours before dawn breaks its promise,

I ride a kingdom no one claims—

a land of fog-veiled doubts and wandering fears,

where even the wind forgets my name.

My armor is not steel but trembling breath,

forged from every night I stayed alive

when sorrow pressed its blade against my throat

and whispered that survival was a foolish act.

Anxiety stalks beside my horse,

not as beast nor phantom,

but as a squire made of shadows—

always handing me the heaviest thoughts,

always asking if I can bear one more.

Depression sits upon the ramparts,

a silent sentinel watching me pass;

its eyes know every fault I’ve ever carried,

and it tolls them like bells in the distance—

familiar, relentless, low.

Still I wander, longing for a banner

that bears my likeness without shame,

a place where my voice is not an intruder,

where my heart is not a guest

at the edge of its own story.

I have fought for love with an untrained hand,

swinging hope like a dull, wavering sword—

not to conquer, not to claim,

but simply to be seen

by someone who would not look away.

But longing is a lonely knight’s burden,

a weight that grows heavier the closer

one comes to the idea of home.

And home—

home has always been a face

I’ve never been chosen to belong to,

a fire I have warmed without being warmed by,

a door that knows how to close

but not how to open for me.

Yet I ride.

Bruised, yes.

Uncertain, always.

Wanting, endlessly.

A knight whose armor was made to crack,

but whose heart, stubborn as a vow,

still believes there must be a kingdom

where love does not vanish like mist.

And until I find it—

or it finds me—

I will wander this aching landscape,

blade sheathed, truth bare,

hoping that somewhere in all this dark terrain

Once, upon an hour hollow, when my thoughts grew dark and shallow,

While I wandered through the remnants of a life I could not hold—

As I drifted, faint with yearning, came a silence slowly turning,

Turning like a whispered warning through a room grown dim and cold.

“’Tis but quiet,” I remembered—“only quiet, nothing bold—

Only quiet, pale and cold.”

Ah, the hush grew heavy, creeping, through the corridors of sleeping,

Casting shadows over memories I had begged the night to keep;

And I wished for some returning, some soft voice to break the burning

In a heart forever learning how the unloved learn to weep—

For the ones who leave us dreaming, though they promised they would keep— Dreaming still, and never deep.

Then the curtains, faintly quivering, filled my pulse with timid shivering,

As if some ghost of comfort lingered on the threshold of my floor;

So to calm the rising beating of a sorrow worth repeating,

I spoke softly, entreating what I’d pleaded for before:

“’Tis a memory,” I murmured, “only this and nothing more—

Just a memory, nothing more.”

Presently my soul grew colder, though my stance grew somehow bolder,

“Reader,” said I, “stranger, friendless—tell me, do you feel it too?

When the world grows faint and distant, when no hand remains consistent,

When your heart in its resistance finds no heart to answer you—

Do you feel your spirit falter when no voice comes calling you?”

And the silence answered: “True.”

Deep into that silence peering, long I stood there lost and fearing,

Fearing that the truth I whispered was the truth of evermore;

For the stillness carried warning that no love would grace my morning,

And no figure, faintly forming, would step gently through my door.

And the only thought that lingered was the thought I’d known before—

That my name is kept no more.

Back into my sorrow turning, all my veins within me burning,

Soon again I felt that aching, more insistent than before.

“Surely,” said I, “surely never shall my reaching find its tether—

Let me grasp this bleak endeavor, let my thoughts the fact explore—

Let my heart accept the answer it has trembled to explore—

‘None shall come,’ and nothing more.”

So I stand within this quiet, with no hand to walk beside it,

With no witness to the breaking that my shadow can’t ignore;

I who loved with gentle power, I who opened like a flower

In the coldest, cruelest hour—am now closed forevermore.

For the world that has not held me shall not open any door—

And I shall be held no more.

Yet I speak to you, lone reader, as a hoping, haunted pleading,

As a voice that keeps on reaching though it knows what waits in store:

If you’ve lived your life unanswered, if your heart remains the dancer

Spinning circles in disaster on an unrelenting floor—

Then you know the weight of silence when it tells you to the core:

My hand remains extended still,

as though it never learned retreat;

it rises of its own frail will

each time abandonment repeats.

I cast it outward through the air,

through rooms that will not hold my name;

the world goes on as I am there—

and just the same as if I came.

I am not shattered loud or wild,

no thunder marks where I have split;

I am the fracture, meek and mild,

that no one sees—and walks on it.

No friend has fixed their voice to mine,

no kin has kept my shadow near;

my life is but a vacant line

no other life has written clear.

Yet love—I know its every weight,

its solemn pulse, its secret art;

I know how gently souls await

the careful handling of a heart.

I know the warmth that words can give,

the hush two quiet spirits share;

I know how deeply one can live

inside another’s chosen care.

I only know it not for me.

It passes by. It will not stay.

I am fluent in a language no one speaks my way.

What law decreed that I should be

so full of what I never gain—

a well of human charity

that floods the world and keeps the rain?

Still does my empty hand extend,

though hope has thinned to threadbare thread;

and if no hand comes near till end—

How does a heart unlearn a name

once it has carved it into bone?

How does a flame forget its flame

when ash still whispers it has known?

You left—no thunder, no decree,

just chose another shore to stand;

yet all your weather stayed with me,

still raining through an empty hand.

I try to summon proper hate,

to forge a blade from what you did,

but anger will not calibrate—

it dulls itself where love is hid.

Why can I not unmake your voice,

that soft insistence, dusk and dawn?

Why does my pulse, without a choice,

keep setting places for the gone?

I miss the mornings said to me

as though the sun required our names;

I miss the nights that let us be

two drifting sparks of sleepless flames.

I miss the chaos in your laugh,

the sudden storms behind your eyes,

the way your silence, cut in half,

still felt like truth and not disguise.

How shall I love another face

while yours inhabits every dream?

What stranger dares to take the place

of one who lives where none can seem?

You told me once—do not let go,

and so I didn’t. I obeyed.

Was that command a kindness? No.

It was a vow my soul has made.

Perhaps you were the single thread

the loom of fate allowed for me;

perhaps I was a word you said

and not the line I longed to be.

I hate the softness in my chest,

this mercy I cannot rescind;

why was I fashioned to invest

my whole cathedral in the wind?

Why can I not grow sharp and cold,

become the man who does not care?

Why must my heart remain so bold

it loves you even when you’re not there?

Tell me—if love can truly end,

what grave receives it when it dies?

What law commands the soul to bend,

to close its wound, to cauterize?

I stand where all your echoes live,

still faithful to what never stays.

If loving you is all I give,

If I am bound for a room with no witnesses,

no name spoken back to me in the dark,

if love will not arrive, nor linger, nor remember,

what covenant asks me to keep breathing?

If the ledger already lists me as excess—

unseen, unchosen, dismissed in advance—

why must I keep paying interest

on a life that yields no return?

I carry days like blunt instruments,

each hour a rehearsal of erasure;

the body persists out of habit,

the heart out of obligation.

I am told to wait for a mercy

that has never learned my address,

to endure until a future moment

that promises only its own silence.

Pain does not instruct—it occupies.

It eats time. It taxes will.

It asks nothing of me

except that I remain available to it.

And if the ending is already written

as absence, as forgetting, as dust,

what law forbids me from choosing

the moment the ink goes dry?

If control has narrowed to this single point—

to deciding when the lights go out,

when the noise finally releases me—

why should I not claim it?

Why should I endure?