Elegy for the Unwinding

verture: The Music Box

How can I let go

when the gears still turn,

when your ghost is a melody

that refuses to unwind?

You play—a huntingly beautiful

carnivore of memory—

the kind that gnaws the bones

of hours I’ve buried.

The song is a blade,

carving initials into the clockface:

Here lies the minute your laugh split the air.

Here, the hour your shadow clung to the wall.

I am the casket, the curator,

the fool who winds the key.



Fugue of Flesh

Your warmth is a rumor

still humming beneath my sheets.

The bed, a museum of absence,

displays the fossil of your shape—

a hollow where your hips once pressed

like continents into the quilt.

I map the cold spots,

trace latitudes of longing,

but the atlas of us

is all borderless ache.

How can I let go

when the mattress remembers

what my skin forgets?



Still Life with Your Hand

Your palm against mine—

a photograph seared behind my lids.

Fingers interlaced, a hymn

of knuckles and lifelines,

now a relic in the reliquary

of my ribcage.

Time’s glacier froze us mid-pulse:

two statues clutching

what the thaw will erode.

I wear the cold like a ring.

It gnaws, it gleams.



Portrait of a Smile

Your eyes: two wicks

that lit the room to gold.

I’ve memorized the creases

where joy pooled—

the left dimple, deeper;

the right lash, slightly crooked.

Now, I paint you in negative space:

a silhouette gnawing at the edges

of every stranger’s face.

How can I let go

when the world is a gallery

of almost-yous? 

The Whisper Archives

The words you left

are nesting in my cochlea—

I love you coiled like a fiddlehead fern,

I miss you a moth trapped in the jar of my ear.

They echo in the vault where vows go to rust.

I’ve tried to mute them with thunder,

with whiskey, with the din of other voices—

but your whispers out-sing the noise.

 Theory of Unknotting

They say grief is a knot

that loosens with pulling.

(But what of the noose

that cradles the neck

like a lover’s arm?)

I’ve tugged the threads:

unraveled sweaters, split seams,

let the yarn spill like viscera.

Yet the knot in my windpipe

only tightens—a black rose

blooming downward.

How can I let go

when the letting is a landslide,

and I am the cliff,

and I am the fall?

Astronomy of Absence

I chart the vacancy you left—

a planet-sized silence.

Nights, I count the scars

where your laughter once flared

across the black.

The bed is a telescope;

I peer through its lens,

searching for your constellation

in the static.

But the stars have all gone novice,

and the moon is a bone

picked clean of its myth. 

Coda: Toward Unwinding

The music box is slowing.

I feel it in the grind of gears—

the valiant click-click-click

of a heart learning to stall.

One day, the song will dim

to a hum in the marrow.

The sheets will forget.

The hands will release.

I’ll bury the whispers

beneath a birch, let them rise

as leaves, as smoke, as nothing

but green and dissolution.

But today, I wind the key.

Today, I let the knife play.

Forgive me, love,

if I dance a little longer

to the dirge of your almost.

Even requiems have their waltzes.

Even tombs have their thaw.