Watering the Dead Things

The room learned stillness before I did,
a held breath between four seamless walls.
No door, only the whisper of plaster,
the slow blink of a candle
unlearning its own light.

I came here trailing sentences,
a poet with ink-dark fingers
and a heart that rhymed too easily.
The silence received me like a stolen thing,
wrapped me in its patient theft.

At first, I wrote my name on the floor.
Then I wrote around it.
Then I wrote through it
until the letters dissolved
into a language that no longer answered to me.

This is the betrayal:
not that the room had no door,
but that I stopped looking for one.
Not that I was trapped,
but that I began to love the trap,
to decorate its corners with pretty sounds,
to call the absence of hinges sanctuary.

I, who had courted truth like a dangerous lover,
began to rhyme cage with age,
began to rhyme door with nevermore,
began to rhyme self with shelf
where I placed myself,
dustable and still.

One day I found a word
that meant both escape and surrender
and I swallowed it like a key.
It lodged in my throat,
and when I spoke, only music came out—
beautiful, useless,
the song of a bird that has memorized the bars
and calls them home.

The candle burned down to a puddle of light.
In the wax, I saw my reflection:
a poet who had traded every sharp edge
for a soft metaphor,
who had built a philosophy out of cannot
and called it peace.

Somewhere beyond the wall,
the self I had been
was still walking through open fields,
naming things by their real names.
She turned, once, toward the sound of my writing,
but I had made the words so lovely
she did not recognize them as a cry.

So this is how you vanish—
not with a scream,
but with a stanza.
Not by a locked door,
but by a lullaby
you wrote yourself,
to explain why staying
was the same as leaving.