My Confessional

Let this page be my confessional & these metaphors my prayer 

for I have sinned in silence too long

my tongue dressed in the mourning clothes of vowels

Words are the daggers I sheathe in beauty

each blade learning to masquerade as a rose

Every poem a breath stolen from despair

a blackbird in my throat rehearsing the opera of grief

until my chest becomes a stage

The pen is a restless pilgrim

wandering the parchment like a fevered exile

its footsteps blistered into the whiteness

searching for an altar

where absolution sleeps beneath a veil of dust

The past is a poet & I am its recurring metaphor

a line break abandoned mid‑sentence

a chorus stitched from yesterday’s ash

Our Confessional

I have learned my grief is just a translation

of the grief cities carry when they collapse into themselves

Every cracked street is a broken rib

& somewhere the earth flinches in my exact shape

In my circadian cycle I battle pain like a front soldier 

bayonet sharpened on the moon’s bone

sleep a trench I never climb out of

my shadow hauling the wounded daylight back into my skull

The wound in me is the wound in the river

the wound in the river is the wound in the sea

& the sea has been weeping long before my name was born

We drink from the chalice of tomorrow

while today still burns on our tongue.

My father’s warning walks beside me like a second spine

if you walk the path of a fool you will bear the consequences

& the road will bend to whisper them into your ankles

I dream of freedom the way continents dream of drifting back together 

as if loneliness is the first geography we all learn

And so I drag my shadow through the corridors of my own body

searching for a window wide enough for my wounds to leap from

Some nights the pen turns executioner

chiseling my ribs into confessionals

& I write until the page becomes a mirror

where ruin learns to call itself by my name