Category: Sovereign Preservation

I began where the world was small and green,

counting the heartbeats of quiet beasts,

the air thick with a lucky, unburdened light.

I was a creature of the open yard,

mischief moving through the high grass

before the maps were drawn,

before the long winter arrived.

Then the horizon broke at the yard’s edge—

a sudden iron weight, a sharp theft of breath.

The right side of the world went dark,

the body redrawn in heavy, stubborn lines,

and the boy who ran was left behind.

The air turned thick and unfamiliar,

and the doors of the loud world slammed shut.

I became the stranger in a foreign climate,

carrying a quiet no one knew how to speak to.

For decades, I have lived along the perimeter,

a solitary drop watching the ocean move in pairs.

I left the crowded tables to the daylight people,

withdrawing into the cool sanctuary of the mind.

Stone by stone, in the silence of great halls,

I forged a kingdom out of ink and thought,

moving across changing hills,

standing before rows of empty eyes to pass down the flame,

yet always returning to the house with one chair.

I can navigate the vast, invisible stars of the intellect,

but I am lost in the simple country of a hand held out.

At 3:00 AM, the old questions still circle the ceiling:

How do you cross the distance between two rooms? What is the word that makes a stranger stay?

The solitude is a heavy coat I never chose to wear,

yet I wear it like armor now.

I am a builder of quiet history, waiting on the border,

hoping an eye will look past the heavy frame,

and love the hidden, wild music of a heart still ready to be known.

Call it an accident of circumstance, if you must—

a boy who stepped behind the stones to let the seasons turn,

leaving the crowded tables and the daytime people

to quiet rooms where fewer fires burn.

They think the silence is an empty choice,

a solitary drift upon a dark, uncharted sea,

or that a lifetime carried at the border’s edge

is only what was left of who I used to be.

They do not know the math of iron and the bone.

When heaven breaks upon the gravel floor,

a child does what he must to keep his breath,

and draws the bolt against the heavy door.

It was not surrender; it was quiet sovereign will.

I built the wall because the house was burning down;

I gathered every stone to shield the spark,

far from the judging eyes that ruled the town.

This solitude was never cold retreat,

but an enduring, fierce, and sacred preservation.

The boy who held the perimeter in the dark

laid down the deep, unyielding foundation.

I survived the world that fractured at my feet;

I lived the only way the body knew.

And every quiet boundary I kept

was simply keeping faith between the two:

the child who held the line against the storm,

and the man who walks the morning, breathing through.