The City That Forgot Its Name
When you left, the jasmine withered on my windowsill, and the city tore its dress of spring. Even the clocks refused to move forward— as if time had no reason without your breath to count. I wrote your name on the tongue of fire, and it burned my mouth each time I whispered it. Your absence is not silence— it is a scream too loud for the world to hear; a kind of death that keeps breathing. Do you know what it means to kiss a photograph? To sleep with a ghost? To dance with a wound? I became the lover of shadows, the poet of empty teacups, the scholar of what could have been. You— you were a war I chose to lose. And I— I am still burying the dead in every poem.
