The Cosmos Lines

You take me home
along the dim-lit avenue of satellites—
the streetlamps, like distant constellations.
We’re caught in their private orbits.

In my fear, Count to twenty-one, you say—
as if the universe were young again,
as if each number were a rung
on Jacob’s ladder.

We drifted downward
through the alleys between buildings,
past windows flickering,
past those rehearsing their small lives.

Sorrow stalking
the edges of our laughter,
a thin animal darts into a shadow
keeping pace beside us.

It smells like rain—
ozone and pavement and promise—
the sky swollen with clouds
bruised violet over the rooftops.

We scream and shout
into the railway tunnel at night;
We let the tunnel answer back—
the voices, not ours.

I’ll be back, homeward bound,
you murmur as a train divides the darkness,
Its red eyes blinking farewell
down iron veins of the city.

All of this is but a machine—
the clock grinding our hours away,
the traffic light blinking green faith,
red doubt, amber hesitation.

If I live or if I die,
will the stars record it?
Will they tremble in their course
or remain aloof?

Why live in the shrubbery,
hiding like a sparrow from the storm,
when the sky is flung so wide
with reckless invitation?

I never want to leave you—
not in this life of spinning forms,
not in the next where memory thins
the unfinished like mist over morning rails.

What was once one is now threefold:
you, I, and the space between us—
a braided cord of breath and promise
tightening around us in the dawn.

From where did you come?
From dirt and poverty,
From a mother’s quiet prayer,
or the long arithmetic of chance?

I’m not sorry,
you say, eyes bright with light, in the sunrise.
We’re not sorry—
our hands clasped.

This slow explosion
is not destruction, but orbiting moons
coming together, a galaxy being born,
burning in the depths of the abyss.

What’s done is done.
The door swings shut on yesterday.
Above us, the heavens keep turning—
vast gears, hidden by the velvet sun—

and somewhere beyond the last streetlamp
beyond counting, beyond fear,
the cosmos lines converge and flare,
taking us home again.