Moon at Half Past Noon

The stainless steel. The dinner plates.
The empty chair that legislates.

He shoves the tray. The roti greyens.
His mother’s sigh is in the cayenne
he grinds beneath his thumb. The door
left just a crack—a narrow sore—
to catch the glass jar’s clumsy knock,
the fumble-key, the staggered walk.
He turns his cough into the wall.
See. See the damage after all.

His jaw in darkness: something set.
A kind of clay, a kind of debt.
Not metaphor, but mineral weight.
A childhood turned into an estate.

She frames the shot: a streetlamp, blur.
A caption waiting to occur.
She picks the song that sounds like gone,
posts it, and then leans hard upon
the posting more than on the ache.
The phone face-down, a tiny lake
of black glass on the duvet. Wait.
Three minutes. Time to calibrate
the buzz—a muted, deep-space tremor.
Who noticed? Did a single ember
of their attention catch? The screen
lights up with loves that feel like seen
and not like known. A borrowed heat.
A satellite’s incomplete receipt.
It isn’t love. It is a chart
of where the quiet parts can start.

His ballad, a smell of old rum, sparse.
The shadow in the door that sways.
The specific way a silence frays.
And once—a hand, rough, on his hair,
a touch so brief it might be air,
a thum impression of a might-have-been
before the amber closed the scene.

Her escape, blue-lit forehead, glued
to a parent on a call.
The credit card left in the hall.
The text that reads Order, okay?
sent from a different time zone’s day.
And in the Love you, sweetheart, chin up, line,
a sluver of something almost fine—
a transaction, clean and sound,
where her success is the solid ground.

They polish mirrors with a sleeve’s
soft side. He writes what he believes
then hides it in a textbook spine
on vectors, force, and drawn design.
Sometimes his pen digs in so deep
the paper fibres start to weep
a sob of something still uncaught—
a thought too fiercely felt for thought.

She types the truth: I am not fixed.
Backspaces till the truth is mixed
with a laughing emoji’s lie.
Saves it. A seed beneath the eye.
A power, small and operative:
to edit how she means to live.

So what’s the core inside the rind?
A boy who uses paper to bind
his fear into a quiet shape.
A girl who lets a digital scape
hold the weather from her eyes.
Each building, under separate skies,
a struck-match light, a fleeting glow,
improvised against the snow.

So this is how the clock repeats:
the digging up of small defeats.
He picks a scab to feel the sting.
She plants a doubt to watch it spring.
Both actions cruel, and both a creed:
This suffering is mine to feed.

One turns to ink, the other to the bright
dashboard of a manufactured night.
Both writing bibles no one reads.
Two solitudes. One set of needs.
To be a fact in someone’s sight.
A specific, and a loved, and right.

And yet, inside the hunger’s ache,
a sense is honed for its own sake.
A nerve laid bare. A tender core
that wasn’t there the day before.
A rose’s centre, soft and raw,
that grows because it knows the law
of dark, and grows to meet it more.

They are the echo, not the sound.
The fertile and unyielding ground
where decades pause, and glances meet—
the hunger of the incomplete.
The pulse. The stubborn, human yeast.
The proof. Not perfect. Not complete.
The proof: a lonely heart. Its beat.
Its beat.
Its beat.