"The Tracker's Breath"

The draft catches light, the spine stays cold,

The crowded rooms of growing old

Are filled with those no longer here—

An empty chair, a passing year.

A recipe in handwritten lines,

A heavy shift where the sun declines;

Not just the house settling into its bones,

But a weight in the air that the silence owns.

Cancer took them, piece by piece,

A slow reduction, a quiet lease

That turned their permanent, vibrant days

Into stories spoken in past-tense praise.

I thought the loss was theirs alone—

The hospital rooms, the fading tone—

But I was never outside the frame;

The script is written in my own name.

It travels the blood, an ancient code,

A double-helix, a winding road,

Where something paces, just out of sight,

In the marrow of the bone, in the deep of night.

I do not know what waits for me—

Maybe nothing, or everything I fear to see.

No lab, no screen, no coat of white

Can map the monster hidden from light.

You learn its shape from the space it leaves,

The quiet rooms where the spirit grieves,

The devastating winter, the sudden chill,

That gutted the world and keeps it still.

I loved them fiercely, I watched them fade,

I watched the wreck that the illness made,

And because I loved them, I cannot say

That I am made of different clay.

It lingers now at the periphery,

A soft, malignant static to me.

Not pain, not illness, but a steady gaze,

Following close through the morning haze.

It watches the coffee pour into the cup,

Like the heavy humidity before the storm is up;

A reflection caught in a darkened pane,

A memory of promises made in vain.

The fear has lost its sharpened edge,

Worn down by grief on the window ledge.

What remains is a presence, heavy and vast,

The terrible power the unseen has cast.

So I live with the shadow, I wake, I plan,

I laugh at the jokes as best as I can,

I watch the seasons cross over the lake,

Though I know the road my own name might take.

I will not need a cell or a scan

To know when it finishes what it began.

I will feel the room tilt, sudden and slight,

I will hear the latch click into the night.

But for now, the tension holds its breath;

Not today, says the echo of death.

It stays one step behind in the air—

An invisible hand, and a shoulder bare.