I will not carry your name in my mouth anymore.
It has turned to ash between my teeth.
Not even your silence answers me now
only the long breathing of the sea.
I gave you my voice
like a house without a door,
and you passed by
as if it were a broken clock
with no hands left to circle the day.
I loved you the way the fire loves
what it destroys—
but you were the cold stone
buried too deep to be burned.
Even the smoke did not rise.
Do not come to me in dreams.
There, you are real
and I remember the weight of your shoulder
as if my hands were still permitted
to believe in warmth.
But you were never mine—
not your eyes,
not your laughter,
not the simple shadow of your gaze
falling across my life.
I saw you once in the light between leaves,
and even then,
you were looking past me,
to something I could never become.
Love,
the word is a wound now.
A river I drank from until my throat ached,
but it never knew my name.
You held the cup,
but only to watch it spill.
I spoke your name into the soil
as if it might grow into something.
A red flower, a bitter fruit—
but all that came was wind.
There were nights I waited
with the patience of mountains,
stone eyelids open to the dark,
hoping the stars might whisper
your footsteps
coming closer.
They never did.
You belonged to elsewhere.
To someone who was not waiting.
To a life without the ache
I carried like bread.
So I set you down,
like an offering
the gods never noticed.
I leave you
in the rain,
not as a punishment,
but because I have no shelter left
to give you.
You will walk on,
not knowing the altar
I made of your absence.
You will forget
how I looked at you—
as if you were the first
and last
sunrise.
And I—
I will learn to love
the silence that follows your name.
I will let the waves
take what remains
and bury it
in the long forgetting.
This is not bitterness.
It is the truth
peeling away like old paint.
The house is empty now.
And I have left the door open
for the wind
to carry you
Broken Author 