Written 26th September, 2026 submitted to Wilderness of Want Poetry Contest sponsored by Ink Empress
I have watched the pond keep widening after the stone has disappeared— its circles searching at the shore for the hand that troubled it. I am that water, still answering a gesture no longer there: what is a ripple without its rhythm? Your absence has a salt I cannot rinse away. It gathers in the cup of my palm, on the bitten place inside my mouth, in the small bruise of memory that flowers whenever night leans close tortured by the taste of touch. Do not make me the tune you hum only when nobody is listening. Give me the dangerous syllable of you; let it strike the locked rooms of your body until even silence knows whom it serves: if I am your refrain, let my name burn. I want the dark stripped of its hiding places: no veil of cloud, no shuttered moon, no small bright lie pinned to heaven. Let every secret loosen from the throat of night. Let even the sky surrender its armour— I beseech the sun to undress the stars. I will no longer call this hunger grief. I will not prune its thorns to make it fit inside a vase. Let it climb the locked walls of my ribs, red and untameable, until I too wake within the rose wilderness.
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