Crooked Prophet in a Borrowed Robe, 2025

Better words of my love drowned in kitchen sink water,

dripping down the porcelain mouth like tired apologies,

beat by beat by beat,

as we ache in the timbre of drying towels and cracked soap.

You - coyote-eyed and chipped nail polish - howled beneath the weight

of unanswered questions,

hurling forks at silence, breaking through the wall of our domestic theater -

I said “I love you” like a tired actor forgetting his lines.

The home became a pilgrimage of slammed doors

and the refrigerator light,

always holy, always humming,

witness to our empty midnight gospels of bread and cheap wine.

We wore each other’s grief like winter coats in August,

sweating through sorrow, too proud to strip down,

too hungry for something -

more salt, more fire, more something.

But love, O love,

that crooked prophet in a borrowed robe,

came limping back from the junkyard of our intentions,

waving a half-burned letter and a bag of oranges.

And somehow, without sense or syntax,

we sat in the ruins and peeled fruit.

Your laughter - rare, sudden, stupid, divine -

tasted like mercy.

We didn’t make sense,

but neither does the moon,

and yet it keeps pulling the ocean home.

If you,

capable of love,

find its difficulties to do so overwhelming,

I shall make it my mission to ease your burden.

At the cost of myself,

with suppressed internal truth that this will combust like a blown fuse,

a matter of time,

a matter of pain,

I began my unlearning,

a matter of time,

until the day soon I'll choose,

to burden the weight,

of a matter of pain.