Ruins

0:00 They tell me people are chapters, that some arrive only to leave, that not everyone is meant to become a book. I'd try to believe that. I'd try to place you neatly between page 12 and page 22 of Incan Aftermath and call it closure. But explain this to me. If you're just a chapter, why does your name keep showing up in mind? Why do I find pieces of you in poems that have nothing to do with love? Why does your voice the living side metaphors I haven't written yet. I swear sometimes I sit down to write about God, about my father, about coming up, about anything but you.

0:36 And somehow you arrived before the last stanza, like you know the way home. Maybe that's what hurts. Not that you left, but that you stayed. Not in my life, but in my language. Because I can delete pictures, I can delete messages, I can unfollow account. But how do I remove someone from a vocabulary they help create? How do I write a problem without reaching for a word that sounds like your name? How do I tell my heart that you are gone when every verse keeps bringing you back? Maybe that's why I hate the word chapter.

1:09 Because chapters end, they turn, they become something else. You didn't. You became a ghost with permanent residency inside my poetry. So if I'm just a chapter, why does your name keep showing up in mind? Or worse, why is it that every time people place my poems they don't realise they are plugging the wounds you left behind?