Solitude’s Many Doors

There is a porch grown out of silence
where the boards remember only wind,
no footsteps, no name carved in impatience.

The light there leans like a patient teacher,
and even the dust knows how to settle
without applause.

I arrive barefoot in my own mind,
and the welcome mat lifts its woven breath,
a quiet yes beneath my weight,
a threshold stitched from absence.

In forests, solitude is a long green inhale,
ferns folding like listening hands.

In empty rooms, it is a bowl
holding nothing—and therefore everything—

the hushed echo of my solitary pulse tapping porcelain.

In the wide desert of an unspoken hour

my thoughts travel as lone caravans,
shedding their cargo of distraction
until what remains is bone-clean clarity,
a compass made of heartbeat and sky.

Here, healing does not shout its arrival.
It kneels beside me like rain at midnight,
softly rinsing the language of wounds.
Self-awareness blooms in the unoccupied air,
a lantern lighting itself from within its own flame.

There are no spectators, no borrowed mirrors,
only the fierce and tender act of meeting my unguarded reflection
and thanking it without words,
as a river thanks gravity by moving.

And even in the crowded roar of
a subway car shaking its metal ribs,
voices colliding like loose coins in a glass jar,
I carve a chamber behind my ribs,
a personal Taj Mahal no noise can trespass.

I step again on that invisible mat,
shut the door of scattering,
and the crowd becomes a distant weather.
Within, a rare gift ripens:
I am held, I am mine, I am unbroken,
a quiet raindrop poised like a kingdom standing whole
in the middle of a thousand passing storms.