In the hour before dawn when the world forgets its name,
when clocks hold their breath and the moon loosens its claim,
there lies a thin crossing, a whispering seam
between what is solid and what we only dream.
I found it by accident, or maybe it found me—
a door in the dark of an old memory tree.
Its bark was inscribed with the grammar of stars,
with commas of dust and the syntax of scars,
each line a riddle, each knot a refrain,
telling of kingdoms that shimmer in rain.
I pressed my ear close and heard rivers converse,
arguing fate in a silvered reverse.
The door opened inward, though inward was wide,
and the sky stepped aside like a courteous guide.
I crossed without footsteps, without any weight,
into a country that questioned the nature of “late.”
There, time wore a shawl woven out of maybe,
and certainty slept like a well-fed baby.
A city rose gently, as if asking permission,
its towers curved softly with deliberate indecision.
Windows blinked open like curious eyes,
reflecting a thousand unfinished goodbyes.
Streets braided themselves, then unraveled again,
as though maps were a rumor the stones wouldn’t entertain.
People passed through me like thoughtful breeze,
their faces half-familiar, their voices at ease.
They spoke in conclusions without stating the cause,
and laughed at the punchlines of unspoken laws.
One offered a question wrapped neatly in twine,
said, “Keep it—answers are harder to find.”
At the market of echoes, I bartered a sigh
for a jar full of thunder too shy to reply.
A vendor sold shadows in sizes bespoke,
each stitched with the outline of words never spoke.
I bought one that trembled like a moth in a sleeve,
it hummed with the shape of a thing I believed.
Beyond the stalls, by a fountain of ink,
philosophers argued on the edge of a blink.
They tossed coins of thought into water that wrote
their reflections as poems the surface would quote.
One said, “Mystery isn’t a lock or a key—
it’s the room where both wait, drinking infinite tea.”
I followed a bell with a tired, brave ring
to a library grown from the roots of a king.
Books fluttered like birds when a reader drew near,
their spines warm with secrets, their pages sincere.
I opened a volume titled How Not To Know,
and the letters rearranged to instruct me to go.
Upstairs, a child counted stars in a jar,
each number a doorway, each doorway a scar.
She smiled like an answer pretending to hide
and asked me my name; I said, “I’ve misplaced.”
She nodded, unbothered, and handed me light,
said, “Use this to listen when things feel too bright.”
Outside, the horizon was learning to bend,
its colors debating where meanings should end.
A forest approached, walking calmly on roots,
trees trading their leaves for articulate boots.
Owls stitched the air with punctuation marks,
editing silence between glimmers and darks.
In a clearing, a lake held a mirror to fear,
showing futures that nearly, but never, appear.
I leaned in and saw not my face but a path
made of choices that softened the blow of their math.
Each step asked politely, each turn let me choose,
and none of them threatened me with win or with lose.
A ferryman waited with pockets of rain,
his boat carved from patience, his oars carved from pain.
He asked for no fare, just a promise to doubt,
to carry my wonder both in and without.
As we drifted, the water sang names of the lost,
and stitched them to stars at no measurable cost.
On the far bank stood a tower of breath,
each floor a rehearsal for dying from death.
I climbed until language grew thin as a wire,
where truths flickered softly, refusing to tire.
At the top, a room with no walls and no floor
held a question that hummed like a barely closed door.
“What is the thing,” it asked without sound,
“that grows when you seek it and shrinks when it’s found?”
I answered with silence, then silence replied,
and together we sat on the edge of inside.
The room filled with maybes like snow without cold,
and I felt myself younger and ancient and old.
When I left, the city folded back into thought,
the market packed up what it never had bought.
The door in the tree sighed and learned to be bark,
the seam stitched itself with a luminous dark.
I returned to the hour where names reappear,
where clocks clear their throats and the moon keeps its gear.
Yet something stayed open, a crack in my days,
where the ordinary glimmers in curious ways.
A shadow hums gently when words fail to fit,
a bell rings from nowhere, inviting my wit.
I walk with a question I don’t wish to end,
for mystery, I’ve learned, is the truest of friends—
not a puzzle to solve, nor a fog to outrun,
but a lantern that deepens the road as we go on.
