At Dusk, Everything Looks Blue

First Darkness

In the eastern sky,
the first star is out.
A single bone, white
and sharp, socketed.

At dusk, everything looks blue.

The world bleeds warmth,
the cool colour of a vein
beneath skin.

Blue,
a bruise that remembers pain.
The horizon swallows its fire,
draws itself inside out,

like a map of your skin,
the only territory that matters.

Call west,
where copper ember drowns.
Call south,
where roots grow dense in soil.
North,
where tightening cold locks earth in silence.
East.

Call light back into your eyes
before this star is joined by its legion,
an ossuary of ancient fire,
a cold promise
marker of what is gone.

Do it now.
Gather the last light like a thief.
Strike a match in the cave of your chest.
Let it catch.

For this is first darkness.
It waits, patient as stone,
to see if you will be its pupil,
or its kindling.

Shoes

i am wearing your shoes
that is how i enter the room.
they fit because you
left too quickly.
your floor watches
my steps
and asks nothing.

i lie down
in your bed
and rest
without listening
for what might come.

on the desk
your books wait
for a morning
that will not come.
outside, the street
pushes people forward,
deciding
who may cross
and who
must turn back.

i sleep
because i am allowed.

i remember how my own
shoes lie by another door,
i remember how another
may be wearing them now.
i wake and understand
how easily
lives are entered.

i return yours carefully,
still warm
inside.

The First Bone

Beneath this ink lie teeth and vows,
ribs of tales,
brittle and time-cleaned bone.

Here, words are an ossuary
of brows,
and knuckles,
knotted prayers that never dream.

I write with marrow.
Let the page decay.
Let tongues recall what lips
were taught to spare.

Each word is flint;
what burns shall stay —
a ghost that leaves its fingerprints
in air.

There is no holy here,
no clean descent,
only ash and root,
and something sharp with wings.

You came for light?
Then watch how dark is bent
to frame the place where light
first learns its rings.

So walk between these letters,
grave and thin.
When a story dies,
that is where we begin.

Unfinished Image

I’ve come to understand this about writing:
it is the inaccuracies—
the imperfect reach,
the difficulty—
that make room for presence.

Here,
time and image
meet.

I ask myself
whether I am speaking in order,
whether my thinking
holds its shape.

But order
does not always move
in a straight line.

The pace shifts.
One can stay
with a thing,
linger,
and still arrive—
elsewhere,
another moment,
another day.

Reading
forms
an inner image.
It must be allowed
to remain unfinished.

Its force
depends
on what is missing.

What emerges
comes not in spite
of the gap,
but because of it.

The point is not
to love the image,
nor even what it does,
but what it makes possible:

something
that can be held
without panic.

This is why
we return—
again and again—
to test
what we think
we understand.

Over time,
a deeper continuity
forms.

People
come closer
to themselves.

Apostle of the Creek

Tell me—what makes a good apostle?

a god’s breath sighs
over the roof of your house
on a stormed-in night.

i heard god is the one
who pricks you with blackberry thorns
when you are out gathering.
the creek behind your grandfather’s house
runs full.
you are barefoot,
armed with a basket.

you reach, bleed,
eat greedily.
you taste blood and blackberry.
the berries stain your mouth.

i’ve heard god speaks quietly
because he does not want
to startle the deer.
his voice is lush, soft,
folded into the sound of the creek
as you fill your basket.

he is in the red beads
at the tips of your fingers.
when you eat, he slips
down your gullet and lies still,
murmuring at the back of your throat
as if to speak through your mouth—
but shy, shy—

i’ve seen god in the arch of your foot
stretching across a rock.
i’ve seen him in your desperate faith
when you leap
from bank to stone.

he watches you
like a fox hunting a rabbit.
a yearning, childless woman.
an oak straining under a vine.
he tastes your blood with you.

tell me—
how do you worship
without a name?

And so the Earth Went Rogue

Deafening Silence

It comes without warning,
like snow deciding the forest has said enough.

No hush, no shhh—
only abrupt vacancy
where small sounds once rented rooms.

The clock, once ticking like nervous fingers,
now pauses between seconds,
unwilling to be first to violate the truce.

In this wide, white room without echo,
even memory moves softly,
careful not to wake the next thought.

Silence is not absence.
It is a different density—
the weight of everything
that was nearly spoken
pressing inward against the ribs.

Here, grief finally releases its breath
without excuse.
Here, joy learns
it does not require an audience.

Stay.
Let the hush complete its long sentence.
It has been composing it
since the first word learned how to sound.