It wasn’t my fault.
Your gaze smelled of poetry;
not writing you would have betrayed
the innocence in our eyes.

My lips, a prison.
My tongue, the guard.
Inside, my dreams—
serving life sentences
in silence.

The loneliest place in this city
has no address;
only my heart remembers
where it is buried.

All you left were my eyes…
I, on the other hand, gave up everything
to find myself in yours.

Come now—
sit with me in this quiet ruin,
and tell me
why we never became «us.»

Subscribe now

Share

Dearest,

A single whisper became a silence sung into the prison of my mind, the cell that smelled of death, of chains, of mold of fear. Your voice scattered my darkness, not by sound, but by the absence it left behind.

The only witness I didn’t know existed, the only one that found the hidden prison of my being without needing to search.

Your presence stirred my thirst for the freedom of knowing. I reached for you like someone who shamelessly wanted to steal rivers of love from all centuries, and still not even a single comforting syllable dropped from your lips. It was then I understood that what I was reaching for could not be given.

A silence so violent, its clarity broke the dark mirrors inside me, full of lies. It tore the membrane between my sleep and waking, leaving no distinction to return to. My pain became a dream with teeth. Whether I was asleep, awake, or delusional, nothing felt real, because truth had already removed what made reality hold. It left me with a silence where everything lost its knowing.

There were no soft smiles, no tender lips, no one with their thumb gently wiping tears, no one holding me whilst my bones were dripping marrow upon the fire beneath my skin. No gesture remained that could translate what was happening into something human.

You were the witness who witnessed, that made distance watch my pride turn into bones, smashed into dust and spread into an ocean of nothingness. I became the moment the grains of my dust touched the water and ran out of noise, where even disappearance had no resistance left.

That is the cruelest nothingness a soul can encounter. My disappearance into unnamed hungers.

A lost remaining that awakened me:
I am fire. I have always been fire. But once I believed fire must consume to prove it burns. I know now that a flame made of silence does not reach outward, it remains, and in remaining, it reveals what cannot stand its light, especially where most humans are even afraid of the light of the faintest stars, so obvious it leaves no illusion to hide behind.

Fear of others’ judgement fell away, I became one with desire.

I no longer mistake it for the weakness of wanting, it is the core of my existence, the eternal power, the gleam of nonexistence at the moment oneness dissolves, the only truth from the ether of my soul —that lights the fire of life in my eyes.

I no longer want truth, I surrendered to it, not as someone who built cathedrals of meaning in the silence of wanting, no longer as someone who wished to conquer your heart. Not you. Not myself. Not the world. Because nothing in that silence responded to conquest.

I meet it as what I have always been, beneath every layer the noise concealed, where nothing needs to be reached for to remain.

The love was never waiting to happen. It was already the only language left after everything silence burned away, the only thing that did not depend on being spoken to exist.

I delightfully became nothing, and there is not a dot left in me from existence. Desire devoured me into the ecstasy of the unknown, where I can create without possession, without the need to be.

Now I want to live in the secrets of your silence, which finally made the noise of being listen to the innocence of my heart.

Where love remained when nothing was left to speak.

Yours,
Still —
not as waiting.
As what remained after the dot.

These letters are not a sequence, and not a theme. State-based, not story-based. Each letter is written from a state, a moment where feeling, thinking, and observing briefly align before dissolving again.

They are not meant to be coherent across time. Only honest in the moment they were written.

To allow what we are, not static, but consciousness moving through a body that carries feeling.

States:

Subscribe now

Share

Dearest,

I drifted off again, just as I did in childhood, into the clouds. For a moment I thought I saw a swallow, then I smiled; ah, my loneliness, which can only dream through its own eyes, how often you have deceived me. Sometimes you filled a cloud heavy with news, letting it fall over me in weighted words; sometimes you tightened around my heart so much that, unable to breathe, you let the wind carry me away. Sometimes you placed a seed in my hand and buried me with it; I still wonder which of us will sprout, as you kept me under a slow, endless rain.

Air, earth, fire, and water. Yes, all of it a dream, each carrying only a trace of you. The more I try to assign meaning, the further reality slips away. Still, I look at the sky, smiling. Again, a bird; defying the grey clouds, its wings pure white. Who knows from which happiness it stole that gliding departure. No, I did not envy it. On the contrary, I only wished it would stay a little longer, just long enough to remind me.

I suppose I am writing to you again. It was not something I had planned. I am always the same; a life somewhere between watching clouds and pulling a pen from my bag. My intention was to take that first paragraph passing through me and, perhaps another day, turn it into a poem. But the pen found its own way again, and here we are.

If a person could know what comes before the desires that begin within them, I think no one would allow them to arrive. Isn’t it a strange thing. A vagabond, a little shameless, even immoral, I might say, though maybe that is unfair to nature. Still, I cannot help but think it. Brazen, yes, it always comes unannounced. Sometimes you find it at your door with suitcases in hand; it lets itself in and settles as if it has always been there.

At first it softens you with poetry, with stories; you think, this is not so bad, let it stay. It comes close, too close, like a lover who skips the introductions, as if time had already happened somewhere else and you were only catching up. It learns the room faster than you do, touches what matters without asking, makes itself familiar before you can question it.

Then it shifts; tell it to look, it avoids you; tell it to love, it vanishes into something else entirely. What once felt precise becomes unclear, what felt certain turns selective.

You accept it as desire, but what it leaves behind has the quiet persistence of sorrow, as if it never intended to stay, only to happen. As if its only task was to pass through you, change something, and leave you with the consequence of having recognized it.

I know. Dreams, metaphors, emotions; and at one end, me, at the other, what we call love, something that never quite leaves, a ghost spread across our skin. We spoke of assigning meaning; yet whenever I try to give something meaning, my consciousness, taking its Gilgamesh role far too seriously, steps in with my awareness and drives away the meaning-creatures that come to my Huluppu tree. As if anyone asked.

As if, for a moment, I had stayed within the ordinary of being human, and let it happen, I could have surrendered to imagination without it being treated as something to defeat. So I leave it now. I watch. What else can I do? And I, like a cuneiform inscription, blend into life’s mysteries.

On one side, the desire to remain human, to get lost in love like everyone else; on the other, a consciousness that does not allow it. It is a strange balance, to feel deeply and yet not claim what you feel.

At times, I think it is a form of mercy, my Gilgamesh, placed among all the challenges life has given me. I feel deeply, so deeply that I can carry the weight of all human tragedy in my body. Perhaps that is why I locked every door to my emotions for years; I could not allow the density of it’s pain.

Then you opened a single crack, and the pressure that had gathered behind it broke through all the walls built to hold it. Sometimes I wonder whether, if I had not built such strong defences before, I would not be writing these lines.

I have no clue why, what, or how. I can only suppose reasons. The result moves somewhere between the ridiculous and the profound. I feel like a philosopher with OCD, whom watched every step to avoid stepping on a line, only to discover that all the lines it feared as catastrophe were simply another form of truth to step into.

Suddenly, all her fears became wonder. What more can a curious mind ask for, when nothing remains to resist or defend? Now, when I remember you, I lean back and let you pass through. Not mine to claim, not a truth to keep, and yet there, like air, earth, fire, and water, all of it a dream, each carrying only a trace of you.

And there stands my tree of life, with Gilgamesh as its quiet guard, no longer protecting it from intrusion. At its trunk, a grave, possession laid to rest. And within that quiet ending, just before it fell silent, the single dot it engraved.

Yours,

Still..

These letters are not a sequence, and not a theme. State-based, not story-based. Each letter is written from a state, a moment where feeling, thinking, and observing briefly align before dissolving again.

They are not meant to be coherent across time. Only honest in the moment they were written.

To allow what we are, not static, but consciousness moving through a body that carries feeling.

States:

Subscribe now

Share

E.A. Escamilla’s essay is linked below the poem.

Petrichor

From a place without time and distance
I was turning back toward love
not with hope, not with mercy,
but like an hourglass forgetting its own body,
my desire like sand leaving,
grain by grain,
pouring down,
each drop touching,
what sees dissolves
in hell-rain.

A silky scent moves between us,
is it your poison running into my veins,
or a god intoxicating,
absorbing my salt,
draining my water,
carrying away my sand,
and burying itself
in the scar I keep closest.

Before death arrives at our door,
I want us to leave a seed in life.

A field of poppies opens inside me,
and I bleed through it without loss,
red not as love
but as fear,
sprouting from sorrow into delightful sin,
do not ask for forgiveness.

Before I plunge into your eyes
like entering a burning forest
without a path,
blood and sweat,
hungry, furious, alive,
not to possess
but to meet the place of your cut in you,
the sword finding its sheath
as if violence grew tired of itself.

The hourglass forgets again,
and I love you gently through it,
through lost moments,
a newly washed morning.

With fiery rain
my evening arrived too early
and pulled you away.

At one touch I flaked apart,
a thousand nights made me pay.

In you
I loved the impossible,
the way it refused to resolve,
the way it stayed burning
without asking for meaning.

Nothing in me moves anymore.
You, my love, the petrichor,
the scent of hell I adore.

essay:

My Conch

What the Sound Already Knew

There is a certain kind of word that arrives already weighted. Not difficult, not obscure -- weighted. You hear it for the first time and something in you responds before the definition has a chance to arrive. The sound does something. The architecture of it reaches into a register you recognize without being able to say why…

Read more

3 days ago · 4 likes · E.A. Escamilla

Subscribe now

Share

Life always gave me the surface
Knowing loving me was hopeless

Some will think this is nonsense
Some will think it’s tiredness
Some will think it’s sorrow
Some will think it’s exaggeration
Some will think it’s vanity
Some will think it’s arrogance

Some may feel it through

Every meaning created not mine
I left understanding, I left time
At the edge of grace
Without human trace
I shattered pieces of myself
As an offer to this ruthless place

Still nothing truly believed
In purity of darkness
Not even silence

I did not want
I removed
Layer by layer
what required life to see

No witness
No language
No need

what does not distort
cannot be loved
in absence

Not knowing distance

Is what remains
when nothing bends

I am not hidden
I am unheld

Nothing in me asks
to be met halfway

Nothing in me waits
to be named

I do not echo
I do not return

I stand
where meaning fails
In honesty of my abyss
Where a lost imagination cries

To be…

Continued.

Subscribe now

Share

Dearest,

Without you, I walk alone through the city, my steps slightly off, as if they no longer belong to the same direction.

After you disappeared, the hopeful days I held onto sank slowly into a dense sea of fog.

Now, there is no longer the cruel collapse of waiting, and I am glad for that. I decided to write you this specific letter, and found myself wondering what will become of it. If I could decide, I would let it remain with me, unseen, never reaching daylight.

After you left, even the desire to write changed its dimension. Whatever we write, we write for one person, yet we want everyone to read it. I had that singular pleasure through your presence, and lost it through your absence. What remains now is a kind of inner barrenness that refuses decoration.

I realized how difficult it is to write, not to be read, but to complete what is missing in me, to express myself in my most naked form. Perhaps that is why I no longer trust the versions of feeling that can be easily written or shown.

Nothing is as described in romantic movies. They define scenes of blue with clouds, sea, sky, flowers, butterflies. But before the first touch, the first confession, the first inner tremor born of intense longing, before the first lie and the first separation, blue is, above all, fear. Colors that deceive with the play of light gain meaning only when they meet our emotions.

If I had the chance to return to our last moment, the moment before our blue, I would probably act just as absent again. But this time, I would had stayed inside your eyes long enough to see whether what you told me in your last message was true. This distorted dissonance is more terrifying than the vast emptiness your absence created. The illness of not being able to convince my body of what your hands had already proven to my mind.

I know you were patient long before I sensed anything. It’s almost funny, when you said, “I know everything I did,” and then moved as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately, I am cursed with the same kind of mind as yours. Even if I was absent then, memory does not forgive when it comes to love.

When we met, our bodies did not hesitate. Something aligned with the quiet certainty of a key finding its lock. Neither your mind nor mine allowed us to understand it. Yet you understood long before me and watched, with that silent, solid promise, the kind that exists before language.

You always preferred to say things without saying them. And I answered you, perfectly, by not understanding.

After you, I stopped observing people. I gave my attention to other forms of life. Mountains, sea, trees, birds, words. The measure of loving and being loved changed. The muddy residue of broken promises, deliberate lies, unnecessary confessions, and small cruelties dissolved into a vast nothingness.

Love was no longer reaching the other. It was remaining and I was too late to rediscover myself, and you.

The fjord between us deepened. Not because you could not express what you felt, but because you knew it would lose depth the moment it entered language. When I understood that reaching your mind was impossible, I stopped trying to create logic between events. I wanted to feel like you.

So I began speaking in the only way I thought might reach you. Through fragments. Through echoes. Through things that looked like something else.

You answered with music of silence.

I believed, for a while, that if I placed the right melody between us, we would remain somewhere, even in silence, engraved into the surface of the world. But still, the petrified pain of not knowing if it would did not pass.

I often imagined that if we spoke again, I would ask you why we begin life by crying. You would probably say pain is not born with consciousness. It existed before us. It will continue after us. Only what had to happen, happened.

Two systems met. Recognized. Collided. Shattered. Nothing more. Nothing less. Or was it me that wrote that to you..

Still, I regret the ordinary things. Not holding your presence two seconds longer. Not understanding that what I thought was warmth was something far more precise.

You held fire without burning anything around you. I mistook it for comfort.

Now, sitting in this blue room, listening to my own heart, I understand something I once misread completely. That silence of yours I once called arrogance was trust. You never tried to teach me anything. You simply stood inside something I had not yet reached.

No beauty comes without forcing pain to obey patience.

This reckoning I carry out by withdrawing from everything has a cost. From the world, from myself, from those I once thought loved me, from my own narratives. But I see now that living, dying before death, and death itself are not separate. They are variations of being.

Not light against darkness. Something else. A composition of both, almost to banal to discover.

You wrote contradictions into me the way water and air touch.

Since then, I have written almost every day. Not out of desire, but out of a kind of obligation. If no one records what has been lived, it disappears. Not symbolically. Literally. Memory dissolves without structure.

And the one writing this, filling pages, leaving traces, does not feel entirely like me either. Sometimes I think it is life itself, trying to understand what it has done through us.

You devoted yourself to seeing others, I did too, but something lately changed, I devoted myself to living too.

I thought that once I stepped out of your field, I would regain control over what remained. That I could shape memory into something manageable. But here, in this quiet, there is nothing to arrange, only living without knowing. And, that’s ok.

Still, it does not stop me from thinking; if you were here, I would not need to write any of this. You would read it directly, from the surface of my face. The astonishment, the curiosity, the quiet panic, the absence of defense. The love in me burning through your presence. It would take you a few seconds.

That is why these words exist. Not to be read. But because you are not here to feel.

Outside, the sky has darkened. The moon will dissolve into the surface of the sea. The sea will breathe in its sleep. And my mind, as always, will break its own structure and rebuild it again by morning.

If someone asks me how I feel, I will not answer. There is simply no answer.

In a life I have not fully lived, I will just observe everything from a distance, from the garden of my love, holding each word like a flower seed in the hands of a Japanese gardener, with nothing and no one left to convince.

And still, everything will repeat. Birth, love, confusion, loss, repetition. The same misunderstandings passing through different bodies.

The world is becoming more transparent to me. Not clearer in meaning, but thinner in structure. I see through things now, but I also see that this has no real use.

Once I was told my intelligence was both my greatest resource and my isolation. And that my honesty made it worse. I see now that I used both not as tools, but as protection.

Even you, last time we met, when you praised my intelligence so casually, like placing a plate on a table, I remember. I did not respond. I always moved away from anything that reflected me too painfully clear.

I wish I had your kind of patience. Your way of existing without needing the world to mirror you back. It was not learned. It was something else. Something like a natural alignment.

Before I forget, read the books about your life. I saw where it had been edited, reduced, made acceptable. It bothered me. My immediate reaction, I should had been the editor. Not because it was wrong, but because it was incomplete. But you allowed it. Of course you did. Exposure, for you, always came with a cost.

I have always felt like someone who entered your inner world without permission. That was our difference. You protected what was real. I moved toward it without understanding its weight.

If you had seen that clearly, maybe you would have let me stay long enough to show you that I could hold every piece of it with the same gentleness I would have held a trembling baby bird fallen from its mother’s nest.

But that is the common illusion. That love, once recognized, will be given a chance. The sweetest foolishness of humanity. Anyway..

Soon, morning will come again. I will wake up with the memory of your calmness, your beauty and silence. If death were not certain, no one would speak this much. Not even to themselves.

Not even you.

But I know you tell yourself you love me. And for some reason, that is enough to leave something gentle around all our fears.

Between us, there were always things no structure could hold. Storms, silences, fragments, music, distance.

And still, something remained. I am not sad. Not exactly. More… surprised. That distance can exist like this. Absolute, and yet not.

Before we part completely, I will say two things, once.

I hope I see you again.

I will never ask again.

Not out of pride. You know I have none with you. But because anything real between us never responded to request. Only to recognition.

If you want it, you will know.

You will imagine the smallest gesture. A hand near your face. Me forcing you to smile. Laughter breaking it. Just me..

And then, perhaps, you will send a single dot.

You remember my dot.

Now a vast love, reduced to that point. Waiting, not for an answer, but for beauty to believe in continuation.

Yours,

Still..

These letters are not a sequence, and not a theme. State-based, not story-based. Each letter is written from a state, a moment where feeling, thinking, and observing briefly align before dissolving again.

They are not meant to be coherent across time. Only honest in the moment they were written.

To allow what we are, not static, but consciousness moving through a body that carries feeling.

States:

Subscribe now

Share

I had wished that desire did not exist
this absolute damage, this perfect mistake

it does not fit being human
this unfinished draft
between them and life

my soul is an epifin gazing at death
as if I might wear its gown of darkness at any moment

and dance my longing
tired of watching the sun pretend
it is used to the distance of my heat

my soul had believed in the absence of love
almost as if taking pleasure
in being left far above

this absolute damage, this punishment
it was as free as not knowing life

I will go beyond love
isn’t it worth returning to vastness
without

a person doesn’t die by wanting
unless it wrote me before you

I’m ready to die
and still love you before love

isn’t it worth returning to such…

To be…

Continued.

Subscribe now

Share

Some hold their longing in frostbitten hands,
some burn through bone no body understands.

Some seek a pinch of love in willing hearts,
some beg for tears from stone that never parts.

Some love from depths that wait to be returned,
some starve the one for shallows long discerned.

Some wait for spring to believe in the sun,
some lived their winter long before it’s done.

Some search for shoulders built to hold their weight, some meet the world with eyes that learned too late.

Some tell their heart: be still, remain, obey.
Some end it clean: no more, no last delay.

And if they’ve seen it all,
there’s nothing left to say.

To be…

Continued.

Subscribe now

Share

The sorrow that has traveled
from the bosom of Eve
the one who had to leave
for not being believed

The love they killed
was not what she lived

A sadness lodged
It sits in marrow and bone
fallen from heaven
carved into stone
hardened tears left alone

It does not want to be seen
or held
only felt
when it leans
just enough

to make you sense

Love is not what stays
Love is what remains
when there is nothing left
to judge
or expect.

To be…

Continued.

Subscribe now

Share

One second before,
I knew absolutely nothing.

Blue as the sky,
never asked why.

I learned so much
from a single touch.

The skin knew
before the mind
had formed a sentence.

How the brain locks
not on what we choose
but on what arrives
without asking permission.

It hurt day and night.
A true biological fight.

The mind lost the war.
The nerves tore
without mercy,
without floor.

I watched a structure fall
bit by bit
until nothing was left at all
except the signal.

Handed a mystery
named in every literary
history of wanting —
lost in translation,
still arriving.

The truth of the body
is not about somebody.

It is recognition.
An ancient admonition
the cells already knew.

Doors opening inward
to the self,
tearing down
every false shelf.

Rebuild.
Throw and replace.
A total new space

where you used to be
to a warmth it encountered once
and has been measuring
everything against
ever since.

You did not stay.
But the moment did.

It lives in me
not in memory.
Not in longing.
In structure.

You were not someone.
You were a signal
my nervous system recognized
before I had a name for it.

That is imprint.

And once something registers
at that depth
it does not need presence
to remain true.

Neither does it need
anyone to carry guilt.

So leave what was,
exactly as it was meant,

not a new story,
only the one
the bodies already knew,
and the mind could not undo.

To be…

Continued…

Subscribe now

Share

A hand touched me.
A name fell from my heart.
It ran so fast
people still use it
to address absence.

I turned to the moon
to ask where
it misplaced its distance.
It sat behind my eyes.
Night stopped arriving.

I asked the sun why.
Like a clock,
day swallowed my lung,
kept breathing in circles.
Time did not pass.

I folded a scream
into the lining of my ribs.
Now every inhale
sounds like
a silent orphan.

A desert drank my shadow,
laughed at my dreams.
The child looked into a mirror
without edges.
It started leaking my face.
I wiped it clean
and lost my soul.

There is a violence
in hope.

A ghost sliding,
straightening your spine,
migrating into the bloodstream.

Nothing crosses now.

Hollowed my bones.

Tenderness is
a foreign country.

I no longer know
how to let it cross
the border
of my wounded skin.

Subscribe now

Share

I have lived in that dungeon,
breathing
the ashes
of flung dreams.

My throat,
a knot
threaded with betrayal.

There is no space left in me
to swallow
love made of remains.

To be…

Continued.

Subscribe now

Share

Time and being
what everyone is seeing
the fear of living
a truth not known

Mass and energy
described by clergy
necessary, yes
until you lose touch

Logic, not much
a grave of hush
blinding as such
away from wonder

Your tongue, a judge
your mind, a nudge
kicking the heart
into a drudge

If people just knew
the scale of their view
ego, a vessel
dressed as a hearse

freedom, a curse
a requiem
without a verse

Not knowing their place
held in the grace
of something vast

where every atom
moves
to keep you from collapse

We moan in misery
blind to delivery
cut off from symmetry

busy with mocking
never knocking
never lifting
an inch of awareness

to face the vastness

Moving through matter
inch by inch
selflessness
makes us flinch

Too deep

Feeling
Seeing

There is no me
There is no thee

Only

fools

with cheap tools
chiseling rules
too small

Thinking we know
missing the flow

A soul death
so slow

Don’t understand me
I don’t have time
for ignorance

I am more than fine
being nothing
a lost wonder
in human design

Subscribe now

Share

Have you ever heard of a present absence?

Where you sit among the crowd, your heart is elsewhere,
where thirsty sparrows escorted me
towards the trace of your scent.

Wanting demanded cedar and jasmine—
The place where it all begin.

Everything we said came to an end,
except the word love.
A tale told endlessly.
again and again
It was never meant to grow.

And still—

Whoever came
stole stars from my dreams.
Whoever came
picked the whiteness from my doves.
Whoever came
cut the smile from my lips.

So—

I am no longer waiting.

You blossom in the fire of my poems,
and I will give you here
a life-giving, eternal kiss.

Not to keep silence—

I loved you,
and I surrender my beauty to the world,
so that every lip that kisses you
becomes me.

And yet—

It isn’t fair
that the world is so small
you see the same people a thousand times a day,
and so large
you cannot see the one you want
even once.

So tell me—

Even if I write no poetry,
have no flower that bears my name,
no street named after me,
how will you remember me?

Will it be through —

The love you denied.
The cut you tied.
The truth you buried alive.

I have dedicated all my lost smiles
so that you remain and nothing dies,
memories sent my longing away.

Until only this remains—

The one who, one morning,
denied the scent of my heart,
now kneels to an absence
that tore us apart.

Subscribe now

Share

Love wasn’t a crime
imprisoned in me

Fear exiled the child
into the wild

Where lanterns leaned
their tail still warm
like a wounded scorpion
dreaming its last dream

The mirrors stung
and time limped
every word burned
desire

My ashes, bricks of your fortress
where its walls grew darkness
through repeated defeat
day lost its sight
and silence rebuilt the night

A heart is no longer a home
Love, a frightened promise
keeping the ghost of inheritance

Perhaps the exile was the address
I was always meant to find
perhaps the crime was love
and the prison, being too kind

Subscribe now

Share

If I like you, I would enter your mind
Half naked, half unkind
Tracing your fears, just like you love it
You would feel free, in the risk of it

I become your fantasy
The meaning, the feeling
That freedom of nothing uneasy
The desire you call disciplin

The one you imagine
When your spine tightens
While lying beside
Where your wildness falls silent

Holding back beauty
Pretending you hide cutie
Paradoxically purity
In rehearsed maturity

It always makes me laugh
These disciplined beasts
Walking like saints
Just graduated priests

Why keep away
From a soul-level sway
Pulling you deep
Enjoying the stray

Where stiffness dissolves
And the part you buried
Finally comes out to stay

There you lay
Still and aware
Like prey that remembers
A hunter was there

You thought I was freedom
A fever, a flame
A place to visit
Without risking your name

Sorry for my smirk
I am the mirror
you never risk
the quiet disturbance
tightening your wrist

The woman you summon
When courage is thin
Not to escape
But to witness your skin

I do not seduce you
I uncover the seam
Between what you live
And the life that you dream

Not touching your body
Not claiming your name
Just walking the corridors
Inside your brain

I know where you hide it
Your practiced restraint
The animal caged
Behind some half-wits’
imagined shame

You call it temptation
A moment, a phase
But I see the hunger
Behind your lively gaze

And what frightens you most
Is not what we do
But the quiet suspicion
I understand all of you

And the moment you let go
You finally know
That truth is
the only hooker
seducing your soul

To be…

Continued.

Subscribe now

Share

The lost years
or was it silence
wondering if you came

What was really all that love?

Water forgetting the sea?
Light denying the sun?
Stars hiding from night?

If I had only known
Nothing would have kept my heart
in absence, in refrain

No, maybe not inhumane

But somewhere
between rain and pain

I finally understood:
you never came
to remain

only to tell
April
don’t forget
her name…

Subscribe now

Share

I love you, probably.
The data is inconclusive.
I’m working on it.

I ran the numbers.
Cross-referenced the silences,
the pattern behind the pattern,
the thing you didn’t say
in the middle of the thing you said.

Still here.

It’s not about love.
Just my curiosity.

My bad.

I once met a ten-year-old paper collector in Istanbul.
He asked me for money.

I had watched him ask for money for food,
yet refuse food
from three people before me.

When he reached me,
before I gave him the money,
I asked him, with genuine curiosity
and zero judgment:

When everyone knows you’re lying,
what keeps you going?

He smiled like someone
who had been waiting for that question
his whole life.

Because the truth is too long to tell,
and nobody listens.

But there is always someone
who will give
to a short lie.

Truth requires seating,
time,
and usually a childhood.

Lies travel light.

We became friends for two years.
He used to throw his arms around me
when he saw me coming.

Children do this
before the world teaches them
to calculate.

I think about that a lot.

Some of us are built wrong
for this century.

Not broken.

Just miscalibrated.

We feel too much.
We forgive too fast.

We see the wound under the behavior,
the child under the wound,
the love the child never learned
to carry safely.

And then, catastrophically,
we understand.

Which tells you everything
about either our capacity for love
or our relationship with self-preservation.

Probably both.
Definitely both.

My friend Dikram.
Ninety-two years old.
Armenian tailor from Kayseri.

Sixty-five years of work.
Every day sitting on a chair
outside his home
in Yeşilköy, Istanbul.

Like a quiet monument
to patience.

Or to the slow repair
of things that tore earlier.

I asked him once:
have you ever been truly in love?

He said.
The first and the last.

When I was rejected
I understood that love is too large
for people to comprehend.

And what cannot be understood
cannot be returned.

I said:
but you understand it.

He looked at me
the way only ninety-two years
can look at someone.

Some people are unlucky from birth.

He said it gently.

That was worse.

Strange thing is,
both were right.

The short lie lands faster
than the long truth.

Love is too large for most people.

And yes,
some of us arrive pre-wired
for exactly this kind of exhausting,
overqualified,
deeply unfashionable sincerity.

We don’t choose it.
It chooses us.
Usually at the worst possible moment.

Always without asking.

Like gravity.
Or taxes.

I cannot explain it.
Every time it’s the same.

We see you.
All of you.

The parts you show
and the parts you think you’re hiding.

Especially those.

Our minds walk straight into you
like a room
that forgot it had walls.

Because seeing without filters is real.
Real is rare.
Rare is beautiful and worth the risk
even when the risk is losing.

We know the difference between
someone who is unavailable
and someone who is afraid.

We choose the afraid ones.
Every time.

Because we understand fear.

We just forgot
that understanding fear
is not the same
as being safe inside it.
We see your capacity
and trust your compassion.

Which, statistically speaking,
has never worked out
particularly well.

Still.

We love you
somewhere between the insight
and the archive.

With full awareness
of the outcome.

With zero ability
to have done it differently.

The truth was always too long.
Love was always too large.

And we
Love..
Despite

well.
Dikram said it best.

Some people are unlucky from birth.
He said it gently.

We smiled.

Because we already knew.

We will change

yet remain the same.

Subscribe now

Share

Let me just sit there for a while
Play my song, the beautiful part
Lay my head down with a smile

Let me find you just there
The place without exile
Leave gently love to repair

Let me take my promise
Nothing else I swear
Just you, life and grace

Let me end where we start

To be…

Continued.

If there was a poem that absolutely should not have been written today, it was this one. I wrote it to torture the darkness.

Subscribe now

Share

What if fear was a song of passion
Melting with the scent of compassion

What if sorrow suddenly died
Its requiem sung by pride
And pain just stepped aside

What if words were never meant for speaking
And the foolish play we call living
Were only breath upon breathing

What if I made you my dream
Waking upon my eye’s gleam
Nothing stands in between
If you trust love to redeem

From illusion
truth stole

Skin on soul
my beautiful whole

To be…

Ccontinued.

Subscribe now

Share