I Got My Back

You cannot find me anywhere,

Hold on, are you trying to reach out?
I must warn you from doing that.
I shall never return,
To whom I was not,
To which I failed to become.

I am the hush between collapsing stars,
The echo’s echo in abandoned halls.
Once flesh, once name, once need . . . now mist,
An afterthought the dusk forgot to list.

Why do you seek me in ruins and rhyme,
Threading your breath through the seams of time?
I unstitched my shadow from memory’s shawl,
And walked backward through silence, leaving no call.

I am not the voice you remember in June,
Nor the ghost that wept by the spill of the moon.
Your yearning is kindling for a long-dead flame,
But ash has no longing, and dust bears no name.

Would you summon a wind to cradle the storm?
Would you weave warmth into what was never warm?
I, a figment of what never fully awoke,
Am beyond the grasp of regret you invoke.

Do not knock on the door of the undone,
Where twilight and sorrow bleed into one.
I reside now in neither absence nor place,
But in the vacant fold of unshaped space.

The soil did not claim me, nor fire consume,
I dissolved in the hush between bloom and tomb.
A chrysalis broken but not reborn,
A wish unwhispered, a rose without thorn.

I flung off the hours that shackled my skin,
Disrobed from my name, from without and within.
No altar could hold me, no prayer recall
What was never complete, never whole at all.

You search for me in sepia dreams,
In letters unsent, in splintered seams.
But I am not waiting, I’m not held fast,
I am the sigh that slips through the glass.

Would you tether the rain or capture the air?
Try to trap silence? Beware, beware.
For I am unformed and will not condense
Into the frail jar of mortal sense.

Turn back, dear seeker, before you descend
Into the hollow where meanings end.
You seek to resurrect what was never born,
A silence disguised in the shape of form.

I was never yours, though you held me tight
In memories polished with borrowed light.
I was a dream you mistook for flesh,
A phantom stitched in the veil of mesh.

So bury your questions in fertile ground,
Let yearning rot without a sound.
I will not return, I was never begun.
I am the flicker that mimics the sun.

Farewell, oh finder of illusions and air,
You cannot find me. I am not there.
I am not gone . . . I am simply free,
From all I was too afraid to be.