Love Notes in the Margins of Sleep

At two a.m., the world goes wide, the clocks forget their keep,

and we become footnotes of light—love notes at the edge of sleep.

Your breath turns pages in the dark, my heartbeat taps to read,

a metronome of almost-words my waking hours don’t heed.

⇋⇋

You murmur vowels made of rain, I answer them with tide.

A penciled hush between our ribs where bolder lines would hide.

We pass each other postcards from the borders of a dream.

With ink that only moon can see and morning cannot deem.

⇋⇋

Your hand finds mine the way a line will find its margin, slight,

and tucks a small apology beneath the cover’s white.

I write you in a fingertip along your shoulder’s seam,

a cursive soft enough to fade but true enough to mean.

⇋⇋

If daylight is the headline, loud, with letters clean and tall,

Then midnight is the margin where we say the quiet all.

We underline the almost-said, we circle what we keep,

We dog-ear hope and tuck it in the margins of our sleep.

⇋⇋

A car sighs past. The radiator hums its gentle creed.

We staple drifting worries to a half-remembered reed.

I loosen all my armor ties; you set your thunder down.

And everything that hurt gets small enough to turn around.

⇋⇋

So keep your pen of drowsy touch; I’ll keep my paper skin.

We’ll write the slowest promises no daytime has to win.

And if the morning steals the proof, the ink too faint to reap—

the vow remains, a whisper filed where love and breathing meet—

Our notes, unshouted, kept complete, in margins of our sleep.