zealous roost
Before the riot,
before the carnival of color
spilled itself across the human eye,
there was this—
a quieter kingdom
where light speaks only in voltage and hush,
where the sun arrives not gold
but blinding white,
a sovereign without ornament.
I wake in gradients.
Morning is a soft confession of silver
bleeding into charcoal rooftops.
Clouds do not blush.
They smolder.
The world is not empty—
do not pity it—
it is distilled.
Every leaf is a blade of smoke.
Every ocean, hammered steel.
Your eyes, twin eclipses
ringed with frost.
In this spectrum of one
I learn the discipline of shadow—
how darkness is not absence
but architecture,
how light does not decorate
but defines.
A red rose, you tell me, is fire.
To me it is velvet midnight,
petals folding like secrets
too heavy for color to carry.
In monochromacy
there are no distractions of dazzle.
Only contrast—
the honest edge
where brightness fractures into night.
I measure love
not in crimson or violet
but in proximity:
how your silhouette
leans into mine
until our borders blur
into a single shade.
The world becomes a graphite sketch
smudged by time’s restless thumb.
Mountains rise in pewter resolve.
Cities hum in grayscale symphonies.
Rain falls like static across a broken screen.
And yet—
within this narrowed prism
I see what others miss:
The delicate tremor
between pale and paler.
The courage of a shadow
standing firm against noon.
The way moonlight
carves bone from darkness
like a patient sculptor.
Color is a language.
This is a vow of silence.
And in that silence
there is clarity—
a stripping away of spectacle
until only form remains,
only contrast,
only truth.
If the world is a canvas,
mine is charcoal and ash.
But in ash
there is memory of flame.
And in white
there is every color
waiting,
collapsed into light.
gaunt oyster
lunar smelt
manic flume
hazy nebula
molten drift
hard herald
upbeat ledge
elder oyster