Late evenings

I'm growing older, slowly

like snow deciding where to fall

Death isn't here yet.

Lingers at my door waiting to fill the space

The burdens I once stacked for some imagined future

I set it down

Besides me.

For it can wait.

With no pretensions, no desire

I take a small step

towards the place where poems learn to breathe

I don't want to live through scribbled lines alone

Nor linger with the ink preserved 

I want to save what trembles now.

This restlessness that hums inside 

And you...mostly you...within my words

So I write, again and again,

repeating the word 'poem' across the page,

as though naming it

I could rescue my own thoughts

from vanishing in thin air

to hold my little universe

in a folded paper