grand lake
The bars of my life have already grown afraid of white.
But now they have also forgotten
silence.
The flowers have grown too much.
They climbed the windows,
swallowed the doors,
crawled across portraits long stripped of color,
as if they wished to hide
everything I once was
before you —
yet with the beauty of their colorful petals.
Crossing the forest beside the plains,
one can witness the immaculate beauty
of wax flowers
hanging from the trees.
Too beautiful.
Too perfect.
And perhaps that is exactly
what makes them dangerous,
like my memories.
Black night-blooming flowers grow as well,
opening their petals only after darkness falls,
because there are pains
that only learn how to bloom
in the silent company of midnight.
I can no longer tell
where the garden ends
and where I begin.
Roots cross through my wrists,
branches rest so gently upon my back,
and sometimes I feel something blooming
behind my eyes,
as though even my tears
were learning how to create life.
Strange…
Because I thought longing
would wither like rootless flowers
with time.
But your absence
seems to function like rain
in its endless cycle.
Now I see roses
growing between the spaces of my fingers.
My body still insists
on blooming within an immaculate field,
flooded by my emotions,
where my feet remain bound to the ground,
and the only rain that exists
is the deluge —
the salted sea of my tears.
At night,
I hear petals falling onto the floor.
And for a moment,
I swear I mistake them for your footsteps,
coming back to caress my face
and tell me everything is alright,
admiring the beauty of my narcissus.
But it isn’t you.
It is never you.
They are only flowers dying
to make room
for other flowers.
And I still dare ask myself:
how does love survive?
It frightens me that it does not disappear.
Perhaps it merely changes shape.
Today I realized
something terrible:
I am no longer trapped in this garden.
I never was.
I could leave.
I always could.
I could set everything ablaze,
with tears in my eyes,
tear out every root,
let the fire consume
every memory of you,
for the sake of survival.
But my hands hesitate.
There is no logic
when speaking of feelings.
I do not understand them.
I cannot bring myself
to lie among these beautiful tulips
and burn alongside the field.
Perhaps destroying what once kept you alive
would mean accepting
that I am dead inside.
That without you…
I was never alive.
So I stay.
Not because I still await your return,
but because, in the end…
even after all the seasons,
there is still something within me
that looks at every flower
born from your absence
and whispers:
“grow.”
And so they bloom once again,
every single day.
Peonies
in the most unlikely places.
Red strawberries,
so rewarding with time,
so simple,
yet beautiful.
Water lilies floating
as if they belonged
to the rivers of my own cage.
Everything…
roots itself into my legs.
I bind myself a little more
to this sweet air,
this poisonous air,
which is the blooming hope
of my prison of flowers.
restive tulip
quiet bobcat
hollow igloo
merry reef
civic river
hazy geyser
sonic meadow
mystic eagle
dusky pebble