I.
Where the parapet crumbles into rumor,
a single wing unfurls like a torn covenant.
Its quill-edges slice the dusk into psalms
no tongue has yet dared pronounce.
The book in his hands is not bound—
it is the wound the sky keeps open.
II.
He reads with the patience of glaciers
that once believed in continents.
Each page is a vertebra of light
snapped from the spine of a dying star.
The letters crawl, luminous mites,
seeking the hollow beneath his ribs.
III.
Below, the city is a bruise
learning how to forget its own name.
Its windows blink like eyelids
closing on a dream they never had.
Up here, the air tastes of iron
and the afterbirth of thunder.
IV.
His shadow does not fall—
it rises, a black seraph
kneeling to the book’s open throat.
Between the lines, a mountain
teethes on silence;
its granite gums bleed altitude.
V.
The wind arrives barefoot,
carrying the scent of parchment
burned in a library no one remembers.
It combs his hair—
each strand a filament of frost
recording the temperature of exile.
VI.
Turn the page and the century turns with it,
a slow hinge of bone and cloud.
Somewhere, a child drops a marble;
the sound arrives centuries late,
a pearl of echo lodged
in the angel’s unblinking ear.
VII.
He is older than the tower,
younger than the dust that crowns it.
His wings are maps of every flight
that ended in reading instead of landing.
The book’s final margin
is a cliff; he stands on it
without vertigo, without mercy.
VIII.
No name.
Only the hush between two heartbeats
of a god who forgot to wake.
The silence here has teeth—
they gnaw the edges of the visible
until the invisible bleeds scripture.
Where the parapet crumbles into rumor,
a single wing unfurls like a torn covenant.
Its quill-edges slice the dusk into psalms
no tongue has yet dared pronounce.
The book in his hands is not bound—
it is the wound the sky keeps open.
II.
He reads with the patience of glaciers
that once believed in continents.
Each page is a vertebra of light
snapped from the spine of a dying star.
The letters crawl, luminous mites,
seeking the hollow beneath his ribs.
III.
Below, the city is a bruise
learning how to forget its own name.
Its windows blink like eyelids
closing on a dream they never had.
Up here, the air tastes of iron
and the afterbirth of thunder.
IV.
His shadow does not fall—
it rises, a black seraph
kneeling to the book’s open throat.
Between the lines, a mountain
teethes on silence;
its granite gums bleed altitude.
V.
The wind arrives barefoot,
carrying the scent of parchment
burned in a library no one remembers.
It combs his hair—
each strand a filament of frost
recording the temperature of exile.
VI.
Turn the page and the century turns with it,
a slow hinge of bone and cloud.
Somewhere, a child drops a marble;
the sound arrives centuries late,
a pearl of echo lodged
in the angel’s unblinking ear.
VII.
He is older than the tower,
younger than the dust that crowns it.
His wings are maps of every flight
that ended in reading instead of landing.
The book’s final margin
is a cliff; he stands on it
without vertigo, without mercy.
VIII.
No name.
Only the hush between two heartbeats
of a god who forgot to wake.
The silence here has teeth—
they gnaw the edges of the visible
until the invisible bleeds scripture.
