Fragments of the Tempest

Inheritance

I learned loneliness the way children learn prayer.

No one taught me.

It simply appeared one day,
sitting at the edge of the bed,
swinging its little legs.

At first it was a visitor.

Then a tenant.

Then it began collecting mail.

Years passed.

I fed it my birthdays.
I fed it Christmases.
I fed it the names of men
who looked at me
as though they had mistaken me
for somebody else.

It grew.

Meanwhile I became skilled
at appearing occupied.

People admire this sort of thing.

The polished smile.
The joke delivered on cue.
The sturdy bridge erected over a swamp.

No one asks what is underneath.

The dead reeds.
The black water.
The teeth.

Some nights I carry my sadness
like a bowl filled to the brim.

One wrong movement
and it spills.

A careless remark.

A forgotten invitation.

A silence lasting longer
than it should.

Suddenly I am setting fire
to the furniture of my own heart.

This is the part no one understands.

The anger.

How it arrives dressed as a burglar.

How it empties every drawer.

How it steals from the people
I love most.

Afterward I sit among the ruins,
ash in my mouth,
wondering who struck the match.

As though I do not know.

As though I have not watched him
pacing in the cellar for years.

The truth?

I am tired.

Not dramatically.

Not poetically.

I am tired in the way
a house is tired.

A house standing alone
through thirty winters.

A little weather enters every year.

A little more paint peels.

A little more rain finds its way in.

The tablet opens inside me

like a small white flower
that only blooms at night.

Soon I am sinking.

Not sleeping.

Sinking.

The mattress loosens its grip
on the century.

The room drifts away
with its unpaid bills,
its unanswered messages,
its photographs of people
who have become distances.

And then

the dreaming.

A staircase wet with seawater.

A woman buttoning her coat
beside a field of black grass.

A railway station lit by lamps
that have not existed
for a hundred years.

I know these places.

I know them
with the certainty of grief.

Yet I have never been there.

Or perhaps I have.

Perhaps the mind,
unable to carry one life,
borrows from another.

Perhaps every dream
is a pocket turned inside out.

Look.

Here is a house.

Here is a winter.

Here is the face
of someone I once loved
before language learned my name.

Morning arrives in pieces.

The medication leaves its silver fog
along the edges of things.

The kettle.

The curtains.

The cat waiting
with her patient green eyes,
as if she has forgiven me
for a sadness
I never confessed.

Outside,
the trees continue their slow work
of becoming trees.

The sky,
despite everything,
returns.

And this is the part
I keep forgetting.

Not the dream.

Not the sorrow.

The return.

How every dawn
drags its pale suitcase
across the horizon
and unpacks the light anyway.

How the heart,
even crowded with ghosts,

still makes room.

Still opens a window.

Still reaches toward
the sound of another voice
in the next room.

Perhaps those lives I dream about
are not past lives at all.

I didn’t know I was this open,
until you arrived.

Small animal, white flame,
you came with the scent of milk
and the serious eyes of someone
who has already learned
that the world can slip.

You sleep and my chest remembers
how to be a room with the lights low,
how to hold a living thing
without asking it to prove anything.

Sometimes you shake the quiet,
a thin barking at the dark,
and I understand:
your whole body is a question
you don’t have words for yet.

I have questions too.

I carry deadlines like stones,
group work like weather,
the loud theatre of family
and the brittle patience it asks from me,
and then you press your warm weight
into the hinge of my arm
and something in me unclenches,
as if I have been braced for impact
for years.

Pip,
I am trying to do this gently.

I am learning your hunger,
your sudden storms of energy,
your soft collapse after,
the way you become a comma
in the middle of my day
and make the sentence bearable.

When you look at me
it is not devotion
it is recognition,
as if you have chosen
to believe in my hands.

So I make a vow
without ceremony:

that you will not be a mistake,
not a passing comfort,
not a sweet interruption
I later apologise for.

You will be kept.

You will be protected
from feet that don’t look down,
from voices that turn love into drama,
from the sharp edges of my own fear
when I imagine losing you
before you even learn
how safe a home can be.

Sleep now, little heart.
Let the night hold its tongue.

Sunlight boards the carriage with me,
a gold animal that settles on my cheek
and refuses to move.

Behind the window, the world liqufies,
trees becoming rumours,
streets becoming breath.

These headphones are two soft doors
I close on the day,
and inside, everything is quieter, truer.

My coat keeps the warmth like a confession,
brown as earth after rain,
steady as a hand on the shoulder.

I travel without hurry,
with my mouth sealed around a thought
I will not spend too easily.

If you read me, read me slowly:
I am only a man
being briefly made of light.

At thirty-nine, I signed my name on the ledger as if pressing seed into good, dark soil. Many do not know the years it has taken to arrive here, the seasons gone barren while I learned to guard my ground from careless hands.

The campus swells with newness — bare-shouldered youth carrying bright notebooks, laughter leaping from their throats like startled starlings. I carry no such noise. My joy is quieter, a thing steeped and strong, poured slowly into the cup I keep for myself alone. I know I will walk these halls without an entourage, without a hand at my back. And yet, I walk with the certainty of someone tending their own orchard, unhurried, unbothered by the absence of other gardeners.

Each form I filled, each number I memorised, was another furrow turned — small, deliberate work that made room for something to root. In younger years, I had scattered myself like windblown pollen, hoping someone else would call it beauty. But now — now I plant only what I am ready to tend. I do not invite the weeds; I do not mourn their absence.

Around me, the air smelled faintly of cut grass and paper fresh from the ream. I imagined each classroom as a plot awaiting the first rain, each lecture a slow unfurling. And me, I will stand in it all—bare-faced, bare-hearted—learning again, growing again, in soil that knew my name and my will.

I will bloom here, I thought. Not wild, not untamed—
but exactly as I please.

Ash Settlin’

It’s a queer thing, peace—
nae trumpet nor grand openin’,
just the slow settlin’ o’ ash in the grate,
the air turnin’ still as the inside o’ a kirk.

I’ve stopped reachin’ for the doors that dinna open.
Stopped leanin’ ower the pier
watchin’ for shapes that never come.
The hearth’s mine, an’ the chair by it,
an’ the peat’s small heart thumps quiet for me alane.

The names I once carried like flint in ma pouch
have worn themselves smooth.
They’re no stones for throwin’ now,
just pebbles that lie where the tide leaves them,
glintin’ a moment afore the sky turns grey.

I’ve kent the cost o’ keepin’
and the grace o’ lettin’ go—
both leave ye lighter,
both leave ye changed.

So I bide here,
while the wind shapes the night ootbye,
an’ the last red in the ember
turns tae a colour nae eye can name,
but the soul kens fine.

I hae wandered through the rooms o’ mony winters,
each wi’ its ain hearth,
peat stacked high as trust,
smoke risin’ like a benediction tae the beams.
The air wis thick wi’ laughter,
wi’ the clink o’ mugs,
the soft crack when the black block splits
an’ sends sparks loupin’ like wee souls set free.

I thocht a fire could bide forever
if a man loved it enough.
But embers fade in silence,
even when your eyes are on them—
they draw their last breath
wi’oot cry or warning.
Some flames I left untended,
some I banked too late;
in ma conceit, I believed
the peat wad aye wait for me.
It disnae.

Noo the hearths o’ ma memory
are no more than dark mouths,
cold as river stones,
their ashes scattered tae the draught.
The folk that warmed them
are ships gone ower the far line o’ the sea—
no blaze to steer them hame again.

So I keep this lone fire.
It burns low, aye, but steady,
its reek curling roon me like an auld shawl.
It disnae sing for ony ither,
an’ I dinna ask it tae.
There’s comfort in a flame
that kens only your hands,
a truth in the peat’s slow giving—
that survival’s no the storm’s defeat,
but the keeping o’ even the smallest licht
against a room made o’ dark.

“Briefly, I Am Fire”

I do not ask the world to remember me.
I am not carved from stone,
nor sewn into the hems of nations.
I am smoke.
I am sweat.
I am the flicker that warms the room,
then vanishes.

Briefly, I am fire.
And that is enough.

I walk the street
like a candle walks the dark —
giving shape to what might devour me.
I have laughed in rooms
built to hold my silence.
I have loved men
who never said my name in daylight.
Still, I burned.
Still, I left ash.

There is something holy
in the knowledge
that I will not last.

That this body — full, queer,
brilliant with longing —
was never meant for marble.

The world has broken itself
against people like me.
But we don’t linger to be praised.
We sing in the throat of now,
because now is all we’re promised.

And when I go —
make no myth of me.
Say only:

he was here,
he lit the room,
and when he left —
he left it warmer.