Before

I am the pause in a planet’s breath, a glitch in the code between birth and death. I am the whisper in fungal lace, routing news through forest space. I’m tectonic gossip, slow and deep, a quarrel continents keep in sleep. I am the thought a comet had— just once, before it went full mad. I’m birdpath memory, sky-sketched lines, migration’s rumour through tangled spines. I’m the echo inside an ancient bone that never quite learned how to moan. I’m data lost in glacier code, truth cached along a mammoth road. I am not God. I am not Man. I’m what existed before a plan. I am what silence tries to say before it backs itself away. I am the itch beneath your name— the part of you you cannot tame.