i don’t belong here

i'm not from here.

Nor do i really think I belong.

This world feels like borrowed shoes—

A little too tight, worn down by steps that are not my own so i wander through its streets,

an outsider to its language, its stones.

In another time, i might have been

a whisper in the wind or a flicker in the dark,

something untamed and unseen.

The earth beneath feels strange,

like i'm forever mid-leap, never to land

while juggling hour glasses watching the

grains of sand slipping through this strangers hands—

i’m just chasing horizons that always seem to be the same distance away no matter where i stand

and...

when it finally comes, it seems the night is longer when i’m alone, the stars seem to burn with an indifferent glow.

They don't see me and sometimes, i wish i couldn't see them.

The mirror shows a face i half-recognize,

i get a little nervous,

a stranger with my eyes who's learned to smile like he belongs. But i can feel the cracks beneath the surface.

Sometimes, the ache of it all whispers like a cruel lullaby reminding me that to not belong is to be forever reaching, forever dreaming of a place where i might finally feel whole.

And yet, there’s some kind of beauty in this alien soil, in finding places where i almost fit in.

Bending like a tree in the wind while learning how to sing with a different bird's call.

There’s a quiet ache in being out of place,

but in that space i find the grace of endless possibility.

To not belong is a kind of freedom, to shape-shift in the twilight, to have loved without a home,

to create new worlds where all the other lost souls can roam and feel at home.

And so i embrace this not-belonging, let it dance in my bones,

for every step away from certainty is a step closer to my own.

In Another Life, a Bird

In another life i'd soar as a bird,

dancing with the wind, free and unheard

with wings that whisper secrets to the sky.

i'd glide through the clouds without having to answer the question why.

Unbound by time i am never late for the sun,

chasing the elusive horizons where the threads of today are spun.

i'd trade my words for the songs of the breeze.

A language of whispers among the trees.

Yet solitude drapes like a gentle veil,

in skies vast and wide where few tales prevail.

No best friend to share my life or with whom to talk to about the secrets of flight,

just me, the stars and moon in the quiet night.

But every instance of existence holds a possibility of dreams,

a balance of joy in the rivers and streams.

For every feathered moment of freedom and bliss there’s a trade of love, a friendship i’d miss.

How beautiful are these lives we choose to weave, whenever we breathe there  are new stories we conceive.

In this dance of souls and existence, ever-changing and free,

each life is a chapter in eternity where we get to choose the life we will be.

Coffee Stains

“Coffee stains”

The coffee stained the paper.

The caffeine helps so i can

stay up later. 

My mind is kind of racing but not like running,

more like pacing.

Each thought a flutter,

a whisper in the dark as it echoes in the silence and leaves a fleeting mark.

Ideas collide, tangling and intertwining

in this restless, sleepless bind.

The night is art, painted on a canvas with time,

where dreams and reality blur and rhyme.

In the quiet,

when there is the stillness my heart finds a kind of fullness.

The coffee stained the paper,

leaving traces of the night

in the morning's gentle glow.