over-shoulder weather
over-shoulder weather
I’ve walked the length of my sentence
long after the gates unlatched,
counting the gravel underfoot
as if each stone might still accuse.
The years have grown moss over my name,
but transgression carved into memory’s vestibule
means there is always one chair turned away,
its back carved with the shape of my absence.
I’ve mended the fence,
stitched the torn sleeve,
poured water into the roots I once scorched—
but the wind still carries
a syllable I cannot unhear.
So I move,
but not without the weight of glancing—
a pilgrim with a mirror in his pack,
catching the ghost of my own retreat.
And forward is a road
that keeps folding back on itself,
a loop of weathered timber and rain‑dark stone,
where even the horizon
wears my shadow like a borrowed coat,
and the door I step through
is always the same vestibule.
.
Red Brick Keshner
Fri 19th Sep 2025 02:34
"in the quietude"
an unread poem
is unwritten poetry —
ink still dreaming in the vein,
a slow current beneath the skin
where no light has yet entered.
Pages breathe in the dark,
their margins uncreased
by any gaze,
their fibres holding the faint salt
of the tree’s first rain.
They live in the quiet tide
before the pen descends,
in the pause
between heartbeat and word,
where silence folds itself
into a listening shape.
In the shadow‑scent of paper
waiting
to be touched by thought,
you can almost hear
the hush of unwoken syllables
turning in their sleep.
Some drift closer
to the shore of speech,
their edges foaming with consonants,
then slip back
into the mind’s undertow —
a retreat as deliberate as arrival.
Perfect in their unspilled form,
they are a library of ghosts,
each spine uncracked,
each title a tide‑mark
on the inner coast.
And we,
keepers of this unbroken harbour,
carry them —
the weight of what has not yet been said,
the shimmer of what may never be —
bound in the quiet tide
that moves through us,
and returns,
and moves again.
.