barren shard
There is something within me
that does not ask for forgiveness,
because it knows
there is no one to grant it.
It was not a mistake.
Mistakes can be corrected.
This…
was accepted.
I saw it.
I knew.
And even so,
I was no different.
I carry within me
the exact weight
of what I could have prevented
and did not,
of what I should not have done
and did.
And it does not fade.
It does not weaken.
It does not dissolve in time.
It rots.
Slow.
Warm.
Alive.
Like a name being repeated
inside a place
where there is no echo —
because there is no way out.
I do not forget.
I do not grant myself
the grace of forgiveness.
Even when I do not remember,
my body remembers for me.
In the silence.
In the exhaustion.
In the way I avoid
looking directly at myself.
There is a trial taking place
somewhere within me
that never adjourns.
And I already know the verdict.
Guilty.
Not for what I did —
that would be simple.
But for what I was
when I had the chance
to be something else.
And I failed.
I had the chance —
the kind one is given only once in a lifetime —
to be the unconditional keeper of your smile.
I remember the way you said you loved me,
how you spoke, in your timid way,
that I mattered.
I had the chance.
And I keep failing.
Because nothing in me
was enough
to prevent
what I became —
the one you would come to fear.
This thing that carries its own name
as if it were
an accusation.
There is no absolution
for one who understands himself.
There is only
the slow privilege
of continuing to exist
within one’s own sentence.
And to feel —
to feel every part of it rot
with lucidity intact.
Each part turning gray, necrotic,
each memory I blame myself for
having cast into a valley
of the darkest shade that falls.
I am incapable of freeing my shoulders
from the weight of your first “I love you”
to your last.
I am incapable of absolving myself
from the judgment that would be, even now,
the desire to still belong in your arms.
I am incapable — I,
the damned,
the worm, laborer of my own ruin —
of forgiving myself
for every time your eyes alone
expressed what you felt,
for every time the world was light
for the two of us,
for every dream I had
that was about you.
Come then…
deliver me my sentence.
I shall be, now and forever,
guilty.
marble surge
unique folio
foggy sequoia
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