DeGiverville

I built a house that doesn’t belong to me.
Sunlight owns the walls.
Wind keeps the deed.
Each morning I borrow the silence,
and each night I return it.

The chairs remember our laughter
better than I do.
The floorboards listened
to arguments I meant as prayers.
The dust,
light as my claims.

I have held them—
the clean fold of linen,
the smell of cedar and bread,
the weight of a coat that fits as if sewn
from a past life’s thread.
But I no longer ask them
to prove that I exist.

I have painted, not for you,
but to see what color wants.
I have kissed, not to keep,
but to learn the shape of her.
I have raised them
as if they were seasons,
coming through me, not from me.

Now I walk
as a guest with good manners—
I use the forks and knives,
but I wash them before I leave.
Beauty no longer fills the hole;
it is the space around it.

When I die,
may my hands still open—
so the world can take back
what it lent:
its taste, its touch, its endless
light falling through windows
I never owned.