06.21.2025 Los Angeles, 5:34 .m.
Before the poem, a few words.
This piece is part of an ongoing practice in writing about what often goes unseen and unspoken. It’s a meditation on grief not just as sorrow, but as an architecture, a language, a kind of sacred intimacy. The poem moves in an elegiac register, mourning what we lose while revering what we offer to one another in the aftermath.
It is mythic in its imagining: grief as a cathedral with no roof, love not as salvation, but as the quiet act of staying. And it is also sensual- grounded in the tremble of hands, the silence between sobs, the glassiness of breath.
As Anaïs Nin wrote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” This poem is a kind of blossoming- a letting go into vulnerability and the sacred wreckage of ourselves.
This is how I write toward the real: through ache, through what quivers just beneath language. For me, writing this way is meditative. It is not about resolution, but recognition of what is.
What follows is a poem about how we fall apart- and how, sometimes, that falling becomes its own kind of offering.
From This Fragile Place
we open not with hands,
but with the silent breaking
of everything that once held us together.
there is a space between sobs
where our bodies no longer touch,
but our grief does.
it curls between us like smoke-
tender, suspended in the in-between.
liminal.
we find that space
and hold it.
grief.
this is the moment the world cracks.
when ordinary sounds turn cruel
in their constancy.
when breath itself
begins to feel like glass
in the lungs.
there is no nakedness more complete
than when we weep before our lover-
not begging for comfort,
but offering the sacred wreckage
of ourselves.
this, too, is wholeness-
not in pleasure,
but in ruin.
when we hold each other
not to be healed,
but to bleed honestly.
to shiver
in the mirror
of each other’s sorrow.
grief speaks in silences
we learn to memorize-
in eyelashes, wet and low,
a kind of scripture.
in hands trembling with restraint,
pressing into another’s
like the weight
of entire winters-
long, cold, and merciless.
we begin to know
a new kind of intimacy:
not the kind that wants or takes,
but the kind that watches
each other fall apart-
and stays.
and even here, even so-
in the ache,
in the cracked-soil mourning,
something holy
passes between lovers-
not desire.
not escape.
but the raw, brutal gift
of being known
and seen
in the hour of collapse.
this, too, is love-
a sanctuary raised from grief,
where the choir of our cries
rises through hollow halls-
like offerings
a temple of shared ache-
with no roof.
just stars.
(Video of frankincense and myrrh burned as an offering.
Music: Miles Davis “It Never Entered My Mind.”)