The Secret Life of Lost Objects

At my feet where the night wears

One glove rests in eternal slumber.

Its pair now surrounds the other hand

It desires softer shores instead.

In junk drawers whose batteries had gone dead

A compass rotates, yet with dignity.

No north to navigate by, no guide to direct

But waits patiently in ambush

Behind the couch that exists beyond time.

A coin rests quietly on the windowsill.

It saw a child's dream

Subsequently let drop under an overhead plate

These lost objects hum an invisible song

A whisper where there once was

They carry scents and fingerprints.

Of moments forever stuck in chance

A hairpin whispers with silver accents.

Made of fractured bones and ballroom lights

A young woman danced once in errorless turns

Until the shadows took her again.

Her brooch had dropped loose in the stars

A tiny moon with metal spots

Now it rests in floorboard seams.

Tragic owning of half-forgotten

A dogtag creaks in attic powder

Yet loyal, but with an ember of trust

Its warrior lost, its battle years ago

But it awaits him like the sun.

The label evokes each whispered vow

The fire, the white flakes, the here and now.

But wars never recall names that they adopt

The label reminds every shake.

Even the remarkable kind of socks

Are there rebellious minds stitched in them?

They vanish not by accident

Still pursue a wealthier life.

In washes of afterlives

They dance in neon skies

No longer plain, no longer paired

Those solitary ones that broke their chain

And broken umbrellas weep in rubbish bins

Still dripping with other men's iniquities.

They recognize the tempests that humans conceal

They hugged them with tears of pride.

If only we could hear what we lose

We'd learn of our youth in worn-out shoes

We'd sit in a circle reading old letters

Or in broken pieces experience the first love

They were never exposed to daylight.

Still glow in silvery night.

Opening it today, which ghosts would manifest?

The smiles that slipped from humans ages ago

A weathered soft infant, grey rattle

Still resonating with happiness in the distance.

It disrupted a world of cradle songs.

Now concealed where its cries cannot be heard

But each shake remains sounding muted.

As is sometimes kept by a mother

As if the past could be disturbed

By palms that no longer remember the word

A place where time bends like paper

Where notebooks meet dolls and keys

Where everything that we discard

Recall us in humble pride.

And maybe when the world is noisy

They arrive in crowds of dreamers.

The tape deck whirs along,

The marble rolls.

The locket is full of secret hearts

Not all loss is worth mourning

Others die so that some can believe

In what we leave behind, and what we discover

In things that will outlast our mind

They wait in stillness, in drawers and twilight.

Your talismans of love and trust

Look back with softer eyes

Lost people are never lost but shy

A notebook lies in cellar darkness

Its pages wrinkled, its ink in bloom

The poem of rushed adolescence

Now wasted with age, but never in excess.

Every line was a pulse of what had burned

A broken heart felt, a lesson learned

Marginal note on the face

Still maintains the silence of place and instant.

A pair of glasses next to the drain

Poor, left in the rain

They had already revealed a world of form

Now rusty in its sheen, beyond the standards

They read the moon to the child first

And garnished the month of June.

Now lenses are filled with ghostly dew

Recalling every colored-in hue

A game piece for a travel set Lys in ground always wet

A fallen pawn from an under-tree

A casualty of strategy

Hold it stand with small hands

Foreign monarchs in monarchical rule.

Now it's guiding the ants

A queen on a mulch bed

A floppy disk in basement boxes

Having in it lost turns' aspirations

Code left behind by minds that lived centuries ago

A game, a song, an ancient world sketched out

And when they ask you what makes you "you"?

It's not just breath—it's residue

The life you left in drawers and in dust

The things that were loved in silence rusted.