Grief is a house with the lights left on,
rooms hum with names no one answers,
walls murmur like prayers gone wrong.
I walk these halls barefoot on broken hours,
treading over memories that still breathe
each step waking something that refuses to die.
Death is a shadow sewn beneath my skin,
it grows teeth where hope used to rest,
stitched to my spine, stretching longer with every goodbye.
A raven crowns the roof of my ribs,
black-winged and watching,
beak tapping like a clock I can’t silence,
its wings folded around every unsaid word,
its hunger split across what’s already gone.
It does not fly away.
It stays.
Like a sentinel on the ruined house of my chest,
counting the heartbeats,
teaching the ache how to speak in my voice,
watching over the rooms love once lived in.
Where laughter still hangs like dust in the light,
it still guards what remains:
the quiet furniture of memory,
the hollow doorways of your name.