When your gaze found mine, the whole world swayed, As if the earth had missed a hidden beat; The sunlight suddenly grew unafraid, Then melted like warm gold around my feet. I tried to look away, but something stayed, A trembling little universe in you; My eyes became two doors I could not close, And every secret seemed to wander through. I felt my cheeks turn roses in the rain, A sudden fire underneath my skin; The stars began to whisper my sweet shame, While little suns kept blooming from within. Your eyes were not just eyes, they were a place, A strange blue room where gravity was gone; I wandered through the silence of your gaze And somehow lost the person I was on. My heartbeat stumbled, then forgot its name, It ran barefoot through corridors of light; I blushed as though the moon had called me beautiful, Then hid my face from heaven's watching sight. The trees leaned closer, jealous of the view, The flowers opened wider just to see; Even the wind became unusually shy, As thoug...
There is a dead moon
buried somewhere behind my eyes.
I have been carrying it for years,
a pale little corpse
orbiting the ruins of my thoughts.
Sometimes I hear it knocking.
Not from outside,
from somewhere deeper.
As if there is a door
inside my skull
and something on the other side
has been waiting
for me to remember its name.
But I have forgotten
how to remember.
My mind is an abandoned house
at the edge of a city
that no longer exists.
The windows are open,
but nothing enters.
No birds.
No wind.
Not even the dust
has the courage to stay.
There are photographs
hanging on the walls
of people I have never been.
In one,
I am standing beside a black ocean,
holding a lantern
filled with dead stars.
In another,
I am smiling.
I don't recognize
that kind of cruelty.
At night,
the hallways rearrange themselves.
The ceiling becomes the floor.
The floor becomes a mouth.
The stairs descend
into places that have no depth.
I walk downward
for what feels like centuries
and arrive
at the same room
I left five minutes ago.
There is a chair there.
Someone is sitting in it.
Someone who looks like me
if every thought I ever had
had rotted before becoming a thought.
It never speaks.
It only watches.
And somehow
I understand everything it says.
You are tired.
You have been tired
for a very long time.
Behind it,
a mirror hangs crooked on the wall.
I look into it
and see my reflection
standing several seconds late.
I raise my hand.
It doesn't.
I blink.
It smiles.
Then it whispers something
through the glass.
I cannot hear the words,
but suddenly
I remember being afraid
as a child
of something beneath my bed.
I look down.
There is no bed.
Only an ocean
spreading beneath my feet,
black as an unwritten thought.
I fall through it.
For a while
there is no body,
no name,
no sky,
no sound.
Only the slow sensation
of becoming less real.
I pass through memories
like drowned buildings.
A birthday party
with no faces.
A childhood bedroom
with the walls breathing.
A voice saying I love you
from somewhere underwater.
A door I once closed
and never opened again.
I reach for it.
My hand passes through.
Everything here
is made of things
I was too afraid to finish.
So I keep sinking.
Down past the place
where language ends,
past the bones of old dreams,
past the black machinery
that keeps the heart beating
even when the mind
has left the room.
And there,
at the bottom...
I find my thoughts.
They are small.
Shivering.
Barefoot.
They sit in a circle
around a dying candle
and stare at me
like I am the ghost.
One of them asks,
Are we still alive?
Another laughs.
Another begins to cry.
The candle goes out.
And suddenly
the darkness has a heartbeat.
Slow.
Patient.
Hungry.
I realize then
that my emptiness
was never empty.
It was a mouth.
It had been swallowing
everything I could not say,
every thought I buried,
every feeling I renamed,
every piece of myself
I abandoned
because carrying it
became too heavy.
Now it has grown teeth.
Now it knows my voice.
Now, whenever I try to sleep,
I hear it moving
through the corridors of my skull,
opening doors,
dragging chairs,
whispering my name
from rooms I have never entered.
Sometimes,
just before morning,
the house becomes quiet.
For a few seconds
I almost believe
I am free.
Then I hear footsteps
behind me.
I turn.
Nothing.
I turn again.
Still nothing.
But somewhere
inside the walls,
something laughs softly.
And I understand,
the haunting was never
a ghost following me.
It was the part of me
I left behind,
growing older
in the dark.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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