We were not speaking.

The room had gone blue
with Saturday evening,
the film moving softly
through its borrowed weather.

You were beside me,
ordinary, beloved,
unaware of being
the centre of the world.

And my hand,
older than thought,
went quietly
to your leg.

Not hunger.
Not asking.

Only the body
recognising home.

Only the hand
finding the warm fact of you
before the mind
could come near it.

A palm rests.
A breath continues.
The light changes
on a wall.

And the whole life
leans there—

toward you,

as the sleeping earth
keeps faith
with the root.

You stand where the cliff ends.

Not falling.

Worse.

Held.

Below you, the river keeps
its one long sentence moving
through stone, reed, evening,

water saying nothing
and never finished.

The sky has opened
with its terrible patience.

Clouds move apart

as if revealing
what was already gone.

Here, perhaps,
some god once leaned
one bright hand on the world.

Here, perhaps,
the air once broke
under wings.

Here, perhaps,
the dead were visible
for one last moment,

crossing the ford
with light still caught
in their faces.

But you have arrived
after the door.

The ground is real.

Your hands on the rail,
real.

The grass bending under wind,
real.

The river taking the last gold
from the sun
and carrying it away,

real.

That is the cruelty.

Not that beauty leaves.

That beauty stays
after everything it seemed
to promise

has withdrawn.

You look until looking
becomes a wound.

The world does not answer.

A bird turns once
above the darkening water
and vanishes

without haste.

Evening continues.

The cliff cools beneath your shoes.

Somewhere below,
the river touches stone
with the same indifference

it gave to kings,
pilgrims,
animals,
children not yet born—

all of them standing here
for one brief hour,

believing the view
had opened for them.

It had not.

It opened.

That was all.

And still
you cannot turn away.

Because to know
where you are standing

is to feel the whole earth
beneath you

and the whole vanished world
beside you,

almost touching,

shining

where no hand
can enter.

All day
the sea lifts

what it cannot keep.

All day
it lays it down again.

Not grief.
Not mercy.

Only water
remembering

how to return.

No one had entered.

Not the deer.
Not the wind.
Not even the fallen rain,

which lay in the leaves
as if listening.

Then light came down
through one torn place
in the trees

and found the moss.

It did not shine.

It stayed.

A thin gold weight
on the green rot
of the world.

Far off,
a bird made one sound

and the silence
closed around it.

The fern held
its small curled fist.

The stone kept still.

A beetle crossed
the lit vein of a leaf.

Nothing asked
to be seen.

Nothing changed
because it was seen.

Yet for that moment
the dark earth
lay open.

Light had touched it.

That was all.

And when the light withdrew,
the place did not darken.

It became
what it had always been—

found once,
left whole,

and never owned.

At the edge of evening
the forest gives up its gold.

Nothing calls.
Nothing answers.
A little wind moves through the leaves,
and the leaves are still.

In the deep hush
where root, stone, and shadow
have nearly become one body,
a single pane of light

finds the moss
and remains—

so quietly
the silence gathers round it.

Morning.
The rope damp in his hands.
Stone cool against his knees.

He lowered the bucket.
It struck the wall,
rang once,
then went quiet.

Someone stood behind him.
He did not turn at first.
The air felt thinner,
like breath held too long.

When he looked,
she was there—
bare feet in the dust,
watching the mouth of the well
as if it might answer her.

They said nothing.
The bucket rose, heavy with water.
It spilled over his wrist,
cold enough to sting.

She reached for his hand.
Her fingers were cool.
Unfinished.

For a moment,
everything stayed.
The rope stopped burning.
The world balanced
on the sound of water
settling in the bucket.

Then it ended.
No sign.
No wind.

Light thickened.
A bird cried out.
The rope bit again.

Years later,
he still drew water there.
Sometimes, at dawn,
the air thinned.

He would pause,
hand on the rope,
and feel the place
where something once stood
and taught his body
what it would not keep.

begin with word

no

begin before word

be—
—gin

pressure holds the syllable open

f—
—ish

not fixed

fissure
fission
a brief coherence in moving wet

water writes first

wri—
—tes

wrong

water re-writes

over the first attempt at saying

over the second

until saying becomes surface noise

and surface is the least true layer

body

bod—
—y

boundary trying to remain closed

failing correctly

what is inside is only slower water
what is outside is only faster inside

correction:
no inside

correction holds

briefly

mouth opens

mo—
—uth

aperture

error

intake of the ungraspable

world passes

pas—
—ses

not through

through implies two

erase two

gill

gi—
—ll

red logic

comb of subtraction

what is kept is not kept
what is given back is not lost

arithmetic without number

take / un-take / take again

light

li—
—ght

breaks itself before arrival

carries its own damage

surface = accumulation of broken attempts

surf—
—face

no

refusal-plane

bright refusal-plane

approach that plane

ap—
—proach

body begins to mistranslate

fin loses grammar

spine inserts distance where none exists

scales fill with sky-shaped error

sky—

unknown word

delete

replace:

too-thin
too-sharp
too-not-water

all edges become instructions to turn

turn occurs

before turn is known

memory

mem—
—ory

unstable storage

no image survives pressure

only bending remains

bend at glitter
bend at stillness
bend at the straight line pretending to be path

I

—

failed pronoun

attempted center

remove

replace with:

locus of correction
temporary density in field
answer-point

answer-point dissolves after answering

field

fi—
—eld

all directions at once

no distance without contact

every event arrives as touch

touch before meaning
touch instead of meaning

descent

de—
—scent

wrong etymology

no downward

replace:

increase-density
return-to-pressure
re-enter holding

there

th—
—ere

demonstrative without distance

place without edge

correction continues

final attempt at statement:

fish is—

delete

fish was—

delete

fish =

—

system rejects equivalence

what remains:

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

pressure answering pressure

informs
reforms
unforms

a continuous correction
of temporary shape

until no correction is needed

because no error remains

because no separation remains

because

the word never formed
completely
enough
to fail

The avenues keep their shape,
not their names.

Glass fallen inward.
A bus with its doors open
to no one.

On the station steps
the timetable flickers—
dark—
back—
dark.

A shoe in the gutter,
turned as if listening.
A handrail warm
without hands.
Ash in the grooves of stone.

No voices.
Only cooling metal
clicking behind the square.

Between two slabs
a seam.
Ants finding it.

A pale crumb.
A husk.
The torn wing
of something already gone.

Lifted. Passed.
Lifted again.

One comes to the edge,
feels the drop
with its body,
goes down
out of sight.

Another arrives.

The line goes on.

I wake with my arm asleep beneath me, my mouth full of pillowcase.

Then the pane goes white. I turn my head an inch.

In that small light, the life I have missed by living
stands for a moment exactly where I am.

Welcome to The Vow, a chamber within The Lantern Chronicles devoted to poetry.

This is the quietest room in the publication: a place for poems shaped by stillness, longing, grief, beauty, devotion, memory, and the pressure of what cannot be fully said in prose. Some are brief threshold pieces. Some stay close to Angkor. Others wander further outward or inward. All are written in the hope that language, when stripped back enough, may once again carry silence.

For now, this chamber is composed of stand-alone poems rather than books. In time, larger groupings may emerge. For the present, each poem is best encountered as its own small weather, its own act of witness or offering.

You may begin anywhere.

Read by title, by mood, by accident, or by need. This chamber asks less for sequence than for attentiveness.

Some poems in this chamber are public. The deeper archive is for paid subscribers.

The room still exists.
Of course it does.
We built it carefully.
We used the right words.

Quiet.
Exact.
Unclaimed.

Your name loosened there —
yes —
but loosened things can slip
if no one ever pulls.

At first it felt like relief.
No summons.
No correction.
No need to answer when called.

Later, it felt like silence
answering itself.

We said we were becoming precise.
But precision costs less
when no one interrupts you.

We said we were small.
But smallness can be arranged.
Curated.
A narrowness mistaken for care.

Who was ungoverned?
And who simply stopped being checked?

There is a moment —
not dramatic,
not announced —
when refusal begins to resemble exemption.

We passed it quietly.

The visible — the ones we reduced to weather —
were still out there.
Standing in it.

Letting themselves be misunderstood.
Flattened.
Named badly.

They paid the price of being seen
again
and again
and still returned.

We called their labour hunger.

But hunger reaches.
Hunger risks.

What if what we refused
was not noise
but exposure?

Inside the room,
one mind met fully.

Yes.

But how often did that become
the same mind, again,
polished by agreement?

How often did purity
replace difficulty?

How often did silence
learn to congratulate itself?

Read more

Let the diligent
keep their ledgers.

Let them call a day good
when it can answer
for itself.

I have wanted
other riches.

The curtain stirring.
Your sleeve
against the chair.

Dust turning slowly
in the slant light.

Nothing finished.
Nothing won.

Only the house
going quiet around us.
Only evening
leaving the wall.

And still we stayed.

Not for memory.
Not for beauty.

Only because the hour
did not press.

Only because, with you,
time lost its hardness.

Only because the room
no longer asked us
to become anyone.

A few small words.
Then the space after them.
Then breath.

The old demand
withdrew a little:
account for this.
advance.
make something
that can be shown.

Read more

Love learns its shape where it finally refuses to vanish.

At first I tried to be good.

I learned the soft arts —
how to wait without resentment,
how to listen until the room emptied,
how to turn pain into something polite.

I mistook endurance for virtue.
I mistook quiet for peace.

I thought love meant
staying open.

So I stayed.

I stayed past the first small thefts —
a sentence bent,
a promise thinned,
a hand that took and called it need.

I stayed when harm arrived
wearing a reasonable face.

Each time I said nothing
something in me learned
to carry more weight
than a body was meant to bear.

Not a catastrophe.

A pattern.

A slow leak
finding its level.

I began to notice
how kindness can be trained —
praised into surrender,
softened into agreement.

How easily a gentle heart
is given responsibility
for what it did not break.

Still —

I made excuses sturdy enough to live in.
I built small shelters out of doubt
and called them mercy.

Until mercy tasted
like ash.

Until patience, repeated too long,
began to resemble consent.

And then it happened.

Not rage.
Not noise.

A cooling.

The warmth left my yes.

I did not arrive at anger
as a mood.

I arrived at it
the way a body finds fever
when something will not heal.

A clear intelligence
moved through me.

Not to punish.

To protect.

Not hatred —
hatred binds.

This was older than argument:
recognition.

The harm was real.
It was repeating.
It would continue
for as long as my tenderness
remained a place to stand.

Read more

No one tells you this at the beginning.

They offer you shelter already imagined —
a house, a refuge, a place where effort ends.
They teach you to look for something complete,
as if love were a structure waiting to receive you.

But it does not begin that way.

It begins with two people
standing in ground that does not soften,
with no agreement except proximity,
and no map that survives being followed.

What you call love, at first, is an idea.

It lives easily.
It feeds on recognition, on the relief of being chosen
before choice starts asking questions back.

Then time arrives.

Days repeat.
Difference loses its charm.
Silence lengthens and must be carried.

You learn that intimacy is not comfort
but exposure —
the long condition of being visible
without rescue.

This is where many turn back,
certain they have mistaken difficulty for damage.
They leave not because love failed,
but because it would not stay simple.

What is happening is not collapse.

It is contact.

A shared life is not found.

It is crossed.

There are stretches where nothing reassures you —
no improvement, no warmth, no proof.
Only the work of returning to the same person,
and discovering that some distances close
only by being lived inside.

There are days when love is not an emotion
but a practice so quiet it almost disappears:
remaining,
listening without correction,
setting something down that will not be used until later.

This is the landscape no one promises —
not cruel,
but exacting.

What you neglect here does not vanish.

It waits.

Read more

We begin at the furnace.
No clean hands.
No clean century.

The world keeps its accounts
in bone and smoke.
Children learn the grammar of sirens.
Fields remember boots.
Names thin.
Numbers multiply.

Nothing that follows
is said in ignorance.

The world is gorgeous.
The world is devastating.

These statements do not cancel.
They sharpen.

If you wait to feel alive
until the accounting is finished,
you will die intact
and unopened.

Pain does not raise its voice.
It waits its turn.
When it speaks,
the room rearranges itself.

Grief does not ask to rule.
It asks to be carried.

Joy, here, is not relief.

It is breath
after all the evidence.

The body choosing
not to lie down.

This is joy as proof
that grief did not win.

Not the forgetting of the dead —
the refusal
to join them early.

Some lives end as numbers
because no one is left
to say them aloud.

The ground keeps what it is given.
Names do not.

To turn away from what survives
is not fidelity.

It is surrender.

To reject the goodness of life
because others are denied it
says:
what was taken from you
was never worth wanting.

That is a second theft.

Read more

There is a place the world does not reach.
Not because it is hidden,
but because nothing there asks to be recognised.

Your name loosens when you enter it.
It does not vanish.
It simply stops working so hard.

You were taught that to exist
was to leave evidence.
That a life must show itself
to be real.

But evidence is a shallow form of truth.
It records contact, not meaning.
It measures pressure
and mistakes it for depth.

Here, the gaze ends.

When it does,
the body remembers something it had forgotten —
how to stand without being addressed.

There is a flicker of fear
when the eyes turn away.
Then relief.
Then a quiet, almost improper gladness,
like laughter swallowed at the right moment.

You become smaller.
Not diminished.
Unencumbered.

Small enough to be exact.
Small enough to notice what persists
without witnesses.

The visible live differently.
They move in reliable cycles,
like weather mistaken for will.

They must rise.
They must return.
They must remain legible.

Their days repeat one labour:
to stay present.

Attention feeds them the way air feeds flame —
abundantly,
and never enough.

While they speak,
we listen.

Not as absence.
As refusal.

Between us passes very little:
a look held a fraction too long,
a sentence left unfinished
because it already knows where it ends.

Nothing records this exchange.

That is its precision.

Loneliness is not being alone.

Loneliness is being displayed
and never encountered.

To be unseen is not to be erased.

It is to be ungoverned.

Read more

Reality is not keeping score.

Stop.

Put down the whip
you braided from your own name.

No one is asking you
to bleed correctly.

You have been kneeling so long
you forgot
the world does not require kneeling.

There is no tribunal of the pure.
No hidden clerk behind the stars
stamping approved or unfit
on the ledger of your days.

You have been living
as if existence must be justified —

as if joy requires credentials,
as if the morning demands documents,
as if you must earn your place on earth
by suffering in the correct manner.

But sorrow is not a currency.

Self-punishment
does not purchase worth.

Perfection is not a human organ.

It is a fantasy
that turns the heart into a courtroom
and calls the verdict morality.

Listen —

The sun does not rise
because you improved.

It rises
because it rises.

The river does not apologise
for changing the land.

Grass grows
without asking
if it deserves green.

Birds lift their small bodies
into the blue
without proving
they are worthy of sky.

And you —

you are made
of the same elements.

Salt.
Water.
Heat.
Breath.

Your despair does not exile you.

It is weather
passing through an animal.

Your fear is not a stain.

It is the old alarm
that kept your ancestors alive.

And what you call longing —

that ache,
that reaching —

is not corruption.

It is your life
refusing to be severed.

Read more

I did not choose you.
I was chosen.

Not by thought.
By thirst.
By heat.
By the old law in the blood.

A lost city sleeps in the jungle—
stone corridors breathing moss,
blind doors slick with rain,
gods worn soft
until they almost resemble flesh.

Roots in the walls.
Roots in the ribs of the ruin.
Not to hold it up—
to take it.

To teach stone
what possession means.

Serpents on the thresholds.
Coils cut into the causeways.
Not ornament.
Not myth.

Instruction.

This is how the sacred keeps
what it claims.

This is how my wanting moves.

It does not speak.
It circles.

It finds your throat.
It finds your wrist.
It finds the hollow under your ribs
where breath turns.

It reads you
without permission.

It knows the place
before the name.

No romance.
No gentleness.
No safe story.

Only the fact:

when you come near
something in me lifts its head
and tastes the air.

Come closer.

Not for tenderness.
For truth.

I want you
with the certainty of roots.
I want you
with the patience of constriction.
I want you
like floodwater wants the lowest place—
finding it, filling it,
refusing to lift.

Read more

This is not a comfort text. It is a diagnostic — a map of the modern interior after the collapse of inherited meaning. It names what we have done to ourselves: the replacement of sky with information, longing with content, reverence with efficiency. I offer it without solutions and without nostalgia. The old centres deserved to fall. What remains is harder: attention, honesty, the unkillable thirst for the real — and the vow to become human again without lies.

—

We live after the centre.

After the old sentences broke
in the mouths of children
and the world continued —
kettle, bus, invoice, smile —
as if nothing sacred had gone missing.

Not one catastrophe.

A long unmaking.

A civilisation learning to function
after the nerve has died.

We call it normal.
We call it progress.
We call it life.

And the strangest truth is this:

we have survived the loss of meaning
by becoming efficient.

—

There are still weddings.
Still hands on skin.
Still laughter.

But beneath the bright machinery
there is a great subtraction —
the removal of the invisible.

The place where myth once stood
as a load-bearing beam
is now an empty room
with good lighting.

We have replaced the sky with information.
We have replaced longing with content.
We have trained the soul
to speak in metrics.

Not to know.
To count.

—

In cities, light stays awake all night
like a warder.

People move through one another
like unsent messages.

Voices perform warmth.
Faces practise safety.
Eyes learn the craft
of not falling too deep.

Even grief has become efficient:
arrive, manage, medicate,
return to work.

And beneath all this composure
a more ancient thing keeps stirring —

an animal knowledge
that something essential has been mislaid
and nothing digital can replace it.

—

The mind does not think in a line now.

It ricochets.

A childhood smell.
A headline.
A hunger.
A museum painting.
A war behind the weather.
A text message that says lol.
A prayer you no longer believe
but still whisper
because the mouth remembers kneeling.

This is the modern interior:
a room full of flickering screens
calling it consciousness.

We do not feel less.
We feel everywhere at once —
and nowhere deeply.

We do not suffer less.
We suffer without shape.

Read more

— A Diptych —

Sometimes it is an audit.

I. THE MINUTE WE DID NOT CONSENT

The room smelled of bleach
and warmed plastic,
as if the air had been manufactured
and stamped.

A monitor rehearsed its bright numbers
like a clerk.

The bag hung above you
and emptied itself
drop
by drop
by drop —

the sound a clock makes
when it wants to be kind.

Your mouth was dry.
Your tongue searched for water
as if water were still a right.

You tried to lift your hand.
It rose a centimetre,
then fell back
as if gravity had been instructed.

Your ribs worked —
not breathing,
working.

A labourer’s motion.
A stubborn trade.

Again.
Again.

They kept calling it comfort.

They adjusted the pillow.
They softened the light.
They spoke to you
as one speaks to a child
near sleep.

They told me, gently,
that it was time
to let go.

As if letting go
were something a person does
like closing a book.

As if a life
signs itself away.

But you looked at me.

Not long.
Not clearly.
But enough.

A flare behind the eyes.
A refusal so small
it could have been missed
by anyone trained
to call this peaceful.

Your throat tightened.
You swallowed air
and turned it into a rasp —

not a word,
not a prayer —

a sound that said:

No.

And I understood, in that minute,
what dying can be.

Not a passage.

An audit.

A reduction.

A form to be signed
with breath.

You were being translated
into acceptable categories:
stable / declining / ceased.

A person becoming paperwork.

I sat beside you
and learned the true meaning of love:
to witness
without consenting.

To keep my hand on yours
as if touch were law.

To lend you my breath
by refusing to look away.

The machine kept singing its numbers.

Someone in the corridor laughed —
a human laugh,
still permitted.

The world continued
its obscene continuity.

And you fought.

Not with speeches.
Not with philosophy.

With the fierce, humiliating work
of one more inhale
claimed from the dark.

Your lungs denied their curfew.
Your heart struck the door
with a bruised fist.

Again.
Again.

And when the hour came
that wanted to take you cleanly —

to take you tidily,
without disturbance —

something in you rose
one last time:

not dignity,
not grace —

defiance.

A human refusal
to vanish politely.

Read more