The Kingdom of Rust
The first thing to abandon a man is not hope.
It is warmth.
Hope lingers like a beggar beneath broken bridges,
asking the darkness for one more winter,
while warmth leaves without farewell,
locking every door behind it.
Since then,
I have spoken only to forgotten places.
An empty railway platform.
A church whose saints have gone blind beneath centuries of candle smoke.
The iron skeleton of a factory,
where every beam remembers the hands
that built it
and the silence
that buried them.
Even God sounds different
inside abandoned buildings.
His voice arrives already rusted.
The walls answer before Heaven does.
Every echo wears black.
I have counted my years
not by birthdays,
but by the number of coats
needed to survive another absence.
Love did not kill me.
It simply placed an anchor
inside my chest
and asked me
to call drowning
a form of devotion.
There are evenings
when I hear invisible trains
crossing the horizon.
None of them stop.
None of them carry the names
of those who promised
they would return.
Their whistles fade
like old prayers
spoken by mouths
already filled with dust.
The crows have become my witnesses.
Each one carries
a fragment of yesterday
inside its wings.
When they rise together,
the sky resembles
a book
burning in slow motion.
I have forgotten
the colour of happiness.
Perhaps it was never a colour.
Perhaps it was only
a light
that iron cannot remember.
Now my hands bloom
with quiet corrosion.
The veins beneath my skin
have learned the geometry
of abandoned bridges.
My bones creak
like cathedral doors
opening
for congregations
that no longer exist.
If grief possesses a kingdom,
its throne
is not made of gold.
It is forged
from every promise
left beneath the rain
until memory itself
turned red with rust.
One day,
someone will discover
what remains of me.
Not a body.
Not a poem.
Only an old coat,
a cracked pocket watch,
and a heart
so completely oxidised
that archaeologists
will mistake it
for the hinge
of a forgotten gate
that once separated
the living
from those
who never truly
left.