I've been placed on hold,
where the music is older
than the person I'm waiting for.

A voice assures me
I am "very important,"
which feels like a polite lie
told by a machine
that should know better.

Still, I stay-because,
I'm next in the cue
and they will "be with me shortly,"
no matter how long that takes.

Then there's the music.
That damn music,
now several minutes older,
but just as obnoxious,
as it was when I first called.

I find you in the hush between heartbeats,
a ghost stitched into the seams of every ordinary hour.

In the phone I refuse to factory-reset,
your messages rise like drowned letters from a shipwreck—
“miss you” at 2:17 a.m.,
the little blue heart I still can’t delete.
I scroll until the screen burns my thumb,
and there you are, alive in pixels,
laughing at something I said that no longer matters.

The moon was a sickle of rusted old bone,
and the wind through the sage was a low, dying moan.
No stars dared to flicker, no cricket would cry,
as the border grew thin 'tween the earth and the sky.

There is no storm so loud, so wild,
that it does not leave behind
a clearing. No night so heavy
that the dawn forgets
where to find you.

Even the broken things-
the plans that fell apart,
the doors that slammed shut,
the days that felt like loss-
carry seeds of possibility,
dropping them quietly
into the soil of your life.

Good grows in strange ways,
it hides in detours, in disappointments,
in the long pauses you never asked for.
It waits in the shadows
until you are ready to see it.

I set the plate, the chipped blue rim,
and watch the world grow strange and dim.
Inside your eyes—those windows barred,
where once I played in the sunny yard.
You look at me, but the look is thin,
like tracing silk where a soul had been.

The shadows stretch across the floor,
beside a man who is no more.
The stories that he loved to tell,
have vanished in a silent spell.
A withered leaf upon the sill,
against the winter’s heavy chill.