The Traveler Who Never Stays

This poem explores the deep contradiction between the desire for tenderness and the compulsion to stay untethered. Softness becomes the thing most endangered, as time rewards detachment and punishes hesitation.

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I am always leaving.

The hungry sort of traveler

whose boots remember no hearth,

whose map folds along the creases

of abandoned tenderness.

Still, the clock follows.

Clinging like ivy,

its tick a quiet predator

nipping at the hems of my longing.

Tick.

Tick.

Softness wilts in that rhythm.

I once touched love.

Briefly.

Her hands trembled

with the sweetness of brokenness.

Her voice wore no armour.

The pendulum disapproved.

It swung —

stern as an executioner’s blade,

insistent as hunger denied.

I left.

I always leave.

The gears do not care for softness.

They grind beauty to pale dust,

crush whispers into symmetrical obedience.

Time is a jealous beast.

It feeds on bloom and blush,

it hoards chimes

meant for better moments.

I hear them even now,

the faint chime of her laughter,

woven between metallic sighs

as hours collapse quietly behind me.

Tick.

Gear.

Chime.

Forget.

The clock I wear is not on my wrist.

It lives in marrow,

etched by choices I stopped questioning

after the first hundred departures.

I chase the next gate,

the next road where no one knows

how softness fits inside ruin.

Love tries to follow.

I pretend not to see

her silhouette smudged

beneath the minute hand’s shadow.

I keep moving.

The clock approves.

And in the dark hum

of endless arrivals and absences,

I tell myself

that hunger is enough.

Even as I hear,

faint and disobedient,

the forbidden chime

of what I chose not to hold.