Trace Memory

The Imprinting

0407.2025

(Something keeps returning to the page.

Not the hand. Not the brush.

Something older. Something I still bleed for, quietly.)

The hour stretches long

at the altar of canvas—

where color won’t obey,

and the brush trembles with memory.

Isn’t it strange,

how one ghost finds its way back—

not through doors,

but through the curve of a shoulder,

through a piano’s melody,

or the burn of wine

when a throat is already weeping.

You’ve secreted it away—

labeled and buried

under strokes of gold

and blues drenched in restraint.

But still,

it lingers—

a grasp dropping your heart

when no one is near

to hear its break.

You tell yourself it’s nothing.

You call it wine,

or madness,

or the weariness that comes

from chasing light

through the mouth of a night

that keeps folding in on itself.

But you know.

You always know.

It is a certain ghost

whose eyes you know—

the echo of a song

made from the same silks and teeth as yours,

a soul-thread woven through your ribs

that refuses to snap.

And every line you paint

bleeds a little more of that ghost—

not because you want to,

but because you don’t know how

to stop.

m.c.f.