On the corner—
waiting for a light that never turns green,
you stand in a limbo of footfalls and breath,
caught between the world you see
and the world you refuse to enter.
Tell me—when did “How are you?”
become a silence wrapped in words?
You nod, you smile, an echo
of routines practiced by rote,
a dance performed for empty applause.
Through a café window, reflections blur—
a face you almost recognize,
but it’s only the ghost
of a stranger’s borrowed gaze.
Pigeons circle the sidewalk,
like fallen stars seeking salvation
in the crumbs we leave behind.
But what if they’re not searching—
what if they’re here to watch us fail?
Coffee burns like buried truth,
sweetened by the lies we tell ourselves.
Sip slowly; let it scorch your tongue—
some revelations are meant to leave scars.
And when you blink, the light shifts:
the red fades to greet
but no one moves—
we’ve grown too comfortable
with the comfort of stillness.
You glance down, but tell me—
have you ever noticed how shadows
cling not to feet, but to the fears
that drag behind them,
heavy as forgotten dreams?
There’s a language in the silence
we never learned to speak—
…the pause between heartbeats
where we bury our questions
like seeds in frozen ground.
So I ask you now:
What if this ground we trust
isn’t ground at all, but
the sky of someone else’s dream?
And what if, in falling,
we finally find the wings
we forgot we had?