Silent Contagion 1

I caught a whisper in the corner of my room,
A paper moth that folded into noon.
It read like weather, like a sentence left undone,
Traced the margins where the light had run.

Every page you left became a map,
I trace your ink and follow back the path.
A quiet fever, gentle as a lie,
I learned to breathe the words you never tried.

You hum like fever in my quiet head,
A gentle contagion I can’t shed.
I keep your lines beneath my skin,
Read them slow and let you in.
You are the story I can’t unbend,
A slow infection I learn to tend.

Streetlamps write your name across the rain,
Each syllable a window, each one a refrain.
I fold the corners of the nights we never had,
Press them to my chest until the edges go mad.

The grammar of your absence shapes my hands,
I press your commas into lines I understand.
A patient ache that learns to wait,
Turns the clock and rewrites fate.

You hum like fever in my quiet head,
A gentle contagion I can’t shed.
I keep your lines beneath my skin,
Read them slow and let you in.
You are the story I can’t unbend,
A slow infection I learn to tend.

Pages flutter like small wings...
Remember how they fall?
I count the margins, count the ways you called.
If love is literature, then I am bound and worn,
A book with missing chapters, edges frayed and torn.

You hum like fever in my quiet head,
A gentle contagion I can’t shed.
I keep your lines beneath my skin,
Read them slow and let you in.
You were the story I could not bend,
A slow infection I have learned to tend.

I close the cover but the pages hum...
Your echo lives where silence comes.
 
You are the virus...
In my quiet head...