The DROP

The world leans forward, slow and inevitable—

As if some unseen hand runs a thumb along the horizon,

smearing golden residue into gray,

the edge of day balanced

on trembling concrete shoulders.

Sunlight is pulled under,

drawn to the silent appetite of asphalt—

a final flare swallowed into the black mouth,

while the air grows so fine it cleaves old laughter,

shreds memory into ribbons drifting

out of reach,

no more than the echo of brakes

on roads that forgot their names.

My hands, disloyal now, become ballast,

metal-heavy, resigned:

anchors lashed to a steering wheel drifting

in a sea emptied of tides.

They do not answer my mind’s command,

do not reach; they rest,

weighted with the hush of unfinished songs.

It is not the road I knew yesterday—

no radio howls, no familiar signs,

just the haunting purity of a yellow line

snaking between two worlds.

A perfect scar, geometric in its mercy,

dividing who I was

from who I may yet become.

Everything—

time, traffic, the unfinished weeks—

funnels into the windshield,

a sudden explosion of angles and glare

where a horizon used to be.

Dread is absent:

only a surgical crispness,

gravity rising up to whisper

its ancient, unyielding theorem

in the marrow of my bones.

A knot tightens,

not out of terror,

but because recognition is a kind of falling—

the drop before the curve,

a prophecy fulfilled in the tensing of muscle,

the microsecond between

exhale and the second beat of the heart.

This is the moment before—

liminal, suspended,

foot hovering above the brake,

breath held out like an offering.

And there is nothing,

nothing but forward.