, and neither does the hour.
The plaster holds the same cracks it held before the power
went out inside whatever used to live behind these eyes —
now something flat and steady where the living used to rise.
The coffee cools, untouched, beside a phone that doesn’t ring,
and somewhere in the distance, the fading hint of spring,
but seasons don’t mean much now when the calendar’s a wall
of numbers without purchase, just a record of the fall.
There was something once that moved here, something urgent, something tight,
that pressed against the ribcage in the animal of night,
but whatever that was, it left quietly, without a word,
the way a season turns without a motion being heard.
The blanket doesn’t weigh much, but it’s enough to keep him flat.
The pillow holds the same impression — there’s a certain peace in that.
The clock makes all its rounds without requiring a response,
and the hours stack like paperwork in somebody else’s fonts.
He had reasons once, a clipboard full of things that mattered then,
intentions lined in columns, full of carefully labeled when,
but the ink has faded slightly and the paper’s gone to soft,
and the reasons feel like something that a stranger left aloft.
What he wanted out of living and what living gave him back
don’t resemble one another — there’s a widening in the crack
between the self that once expected and the self that now remains,
and the gap is not a wound now, it’s just emptiness that drains.
The evening brings no different heft than what the morning bore.
The dark is just the light refiled, a corridor,
and somewhere in the night outside, the world is being loud,
but the sound arrives like weather through a thick and distant cloud.
He doesn’t mourn the feeling — that would take a kind of care
he’s not equipped to generate from this ordinary chair,
and caring about caring would require that something hurt,
but the nerve endings have learned to let the signals stay inert.
The ceiling never changes, and the hours never care,
and the man inside the stillness has grown comfortable there.
He doesn’t seek the burning and he doesn’t fear the flat —
just the ceiling and the quiet and the fact of this and that.
The window lets in grey and lets the grey back out again.
The room holds all its contents in the inventory of when,
and somewhere between waking and the long familiar sleep,
the man inside the stillness counts exactly nothing worth keeping.
He does not frame it as depression and he does not frame it as peace,
it’s more like the negotiated terms of a mutual release
between the man he used to be and the man who took his place —
a calm administrative handoff and a quiet change of face.
The ceiling cracks have names he made up in the years of lying here.
The water stain above the window has been slowly moving, year by year,
crawling west across the plaster in its patient, damp expansion —
one thing in the stillness with a motion and a plan in it.
He used to think the stillness was a phase between two louder things,
a rest stop on the highway of the life that living brings.
Now he understands the stillness is the destination and the road,
and the man inside it carries it the way a man carries his code.
The light that comes at morning is the same light every day,
the familiar angle of the winter sun on the same display
of ceiling and of plaster and of window and of wall,
and the man inside the stillness doesn’t need to feel it all.
No fire, no noise. Just the ceiling and the year.
No fire, no noise. Just the stillness settled here.