What The Moon Buried In My Chest

I swallowed a clock and it never struck twelve. Now time drips from my ribs in Morse code, each tick a prayer carved in reverse. The stars forgot my name, so I renamed myself after things that break quietly, a bruise in the shape of a hymn, a mirror that bleeds only under moonlight. There’s a violin growing behind my lungs, strings pulled taut with the nerves I never learned to silence. Every breath is a sonata of knives, still, I play it sweetly, as if pain is just another way to stay melodic. He touched me like an eclipse touches the sun, brief, devastating, impossible to look at. I didn’t burn. I became the shadow. Something softer than ash, but just as forgotten. The ocean inside me has no shore. It loops in on itself like a lie I told too well, saltwater laced with syllables I choked on, his name, folded into the lining of my stomach like a secret I mistook for hunger. I wrote love letters on paper made of smoke, sealed them with the blood of a voice I no longer use. They vanished in the wind, or maybe into him. He was always good at absorbing storms and pretending they were rain. The saints won’t take me. I burned my wings for warmth too early and now I sleep inside the furnace of what I couldn’t say. Even silence has a temperature. Mine rests somewhere between longing and combustion. I dream in algebra. His face is always x, unknown, unsolvable, but rooted deep in the math of me. If you ever find my ghost, don’t call it a haunting. Call it a rhythm. A heartbeat trapped in a hallway. A pulse too stubborn to quit.