When one withholds their perspective,
This is the most sour grape.
That is like wine gone bad,
Caustic & acidic.
Destructive to the natural flow
Of the great amphoras.

They call them crocodile tears
When animals muddy the waters
By disturbing silt or dirt
And thereby obscuring/obstructing
What is otherwise a clear view.
As like pouring wine into a cup of water.

. (Mythology Re-Imagined As Fairy-Tale & Deconstructed) .

No one recalls when he arrived.
He was already there, in the corners of high rooms.
Carried in on wind or instinct.
Too composed to belong, too still to be ignored.

He wasn't from the sea, though he stared at it often.
Stared like a man who missed something he never touched.
He lived above things—above feeling, above endings.
He wore distance like other men wear charm.

And she—well.
She wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

---

They said she’d been sealed beneath water before time had a name.
Not drowned. Not sleeping.
Just paused.

A beauty left half-sketched.
A song trapped on the bridge, never reaching the chorus.
She existed in the almost.
The kind of presence that ruins men who believe in silence.

No one put her there.
But something had.
Something old and silver-lipped, a clockmaker with no face.

---

When he found out, he didn’t shout.
Didn’t storm.
Storms are for men who want to be heard.

He simply started unmaking himself.

Small things, at first:

Giving away secrets he never told.

Letting starlight fall from his shoulders like ash.

Standing in rooms long enough for people to forget he was tall.

Eventually, he gave away the last thing he had—
the part of him that never wanted anything.

And that was enough.

---

She came back like foam curling over marble.
Not as a lover. Not as a reward.
As weather.

She passed him by.

Looked at the space he’d vacated inside himself
and nodded, as if to say: “Yes. That will do.”

---

After that, things changed.

She walked through the city like someone who could end it.
Touched doorframes and left them trembling.
Spoke only when the sentence would shatter something.

He, on the other hand,
was seen less and less.
Not gone—just thinned out, like smoke after a gunshot.

---

Some say he became the silence in her laugh.
Others claim he left, unfinished, like a poem crumpled in a lover’s pocket.
No one’s sure.

But if you ask the sea just right—
after midnight, after mirrors—
you’ll hear it whisper:

“He let go of the sky, so she could walk through it.”

{fin}

. (or: the night I vanished while still in the room) .

He stopped coming home late—
not out of guilt, but because
there was nothing left to hide.

I watched him re-enter
like a man returning to a house he built
on land that was only technically¹ mine.

My scent had faded from the sheets.
His cologne now lingered longer than my voice.

He called me darling
in the same tone I used to use
when I meant goodbye.

I touched his back one night,
the way I used to trace stars across it,
and he flinched—
not like it hurt,
but like it meant nothing.

The watch on my wrist had stopped ticking.
I hadn’t noticed in days.

Over dinner,
he quoted my own stories back to me,
trimmed for elegance,
rearranged for effect.

“I don’t remember it like that,” I said.
“You weren’t meant to,” he replied,
not cruelly—just… correctly.

The eclipse doesn’t apologize for the sun.

In the mirror,
I saw only one of us
reflected clearly.

And it wasn’t me.

I asked him what he wanted.
He said,
“Everything you’ve ever had.”

And smiled like he already did.

I laughed.
He didn’t laugh back.

I told him I loved him.

He said,
“I know.
That’s why this had to happen.”

And somewhere in that moment,
between my mouth opening
and his walking away,
I became myth—
the kind they misremember
on purpose.

The Gordian Knot?
¹ The mesh of civilization.

To untie it is to understand it,
To know it.
This is to TIGHTEN it.

To cleave it is to try to conquer it;
It all comes undone,
Never to be re-strung.

You can be Prometheus,
Who was actually always celebrated,
Or you can be Aeneas -
The one who was really ChAINhed to the rock.

What matters is learning,
² All else is for naught.

"And it is I
Deciding where & when, if,
¹ You shall go."

"And it is I
Who rows from shore to shore
² Ferrying each passenger."

My nests you lay,
Learning to create before you are even created.
Protected by my daughters,
Medusa & Pythia.
Likewise, neither shall you truly sink before you swim.

My waters you wade,
Learning to swim before you even walk.
Protected by my sons,
Castor & Pollux.
Similarly, provided for & cared for.

To conquer is to make a new companion.
² We are stronger together.

No companion can be had from a conqueror .
All must be equal.

For the inherent difference of each mentioned is too vast.
Such gaps can never be bridged.

¹ And the river swells
So that one can not ford it
Without some assistance.

. (or: when I heard my voice come from his mouth) .

At first, it was flattery—
the way he wore his collar the same way I do,
the way he started lighting my brand of cigarettes,
the way his laugh hit the same register
I used to throw like a knife across rooms.

I caught him reading my journal once—
not with guilt, but reverence.
“I like the way your thoughts bleed,”
he said, closing the leather cover like scripture.

He stopped asking me questions.
He already knew the answers.

My shirts disappeared one by one.
Then my habits.
Then my silences.

I watched him pour bourbon
with the same three-count I perfected in 1994.
Watched him cross his legs just so,
quote my warnings back to me
as if they were lessons he taught himself.

He ****** me like a rehearsal.
And I let him—God help me—
because some part of me believed
that to be repeated is to be remembered.

But memory is a shallow grave.

One night,
he answered the phone with my cadence.

“This is he,” he said—
voice dry as an autumn branch.
And for a second,
even I believed him.

I didn’t confront him.
I just started talking less.

He filled the air like a flood.
My presence became parentheses.

In bed,
he started calling me old man—
not as a kink,
but as a countdown.

I smiled.
But it tasted like rust.

The boy I devoured
was digesting me back.

And prophecy, that silent ******,
licked its lips
and kept watching.