Nineteen candles
Wax on your desk
Sketchbooks stacked
In a quiet mess
Coffee rings
On the same old page
You drew brave worlds
From a narrow bed
Walter on the windowsill
Tail wrapped tight around his feet
Watching all your colors spill
Onto paper
Onto me
You were soft
But you shook the room
Turned a whisper
Into truth
Kind hands
Calling out the cruel
You drew a better world
And believed it could be real
Now it’s you I feel
In Walter on the windowsill
You’d shade in faces
No one sees
Kids in cages
Girls like you and me
“Fair is fair”
You’d always say
Even when your own body
Gave everything away
Hospital light
On your chipped black nails
You laughed at the fear
Like
“it always fails” (hey)
And you still asked nurses
About their days
Kept your anger pointed
At the unfair ways
You were soft
But you shook the room
Turned a whisper
Into truth
Kind hands
Calling out the cruel
You drew a better world
And believed it could be real
Now it’s you I feel
In Walter on the windowsill
I keep your pens
In a coffee jar
Your name in ink
On my arm
In my heart
When the headlines hurt
And the night turns mean
I ask
“What would you say?”
And I hear you speak
You were soft
But you shook the room
Turned a whisper
Into truth
Kind hands
Calling out the cruel
You drew a better world
And it still feels real
Every line you left behind
Helps us mend and heal
And when the house goes still
It’s you I feel
In Walter on the windowsill
Sketchbook open on the floor
Charcoal dust on your knees
You said
“One more line
Then I’ll sleep”
You never listened to yourself
Soft hair caught in the lamp glow
Pages breathing in your hands
You drew strangers like you’d known them
Like you’d borrowed all their past
Amélie in the margins
Nineteen years in crooked lines
You kept hiding in the shadows
So the colors burned inside
Now the room is still and waiting
Pencils cold along the spine
Amélie in the margins
I keep tracing you in mine
Your name carved small in the table
Next to half a finished face
Eyes you never got to darken
Still stare out into the space
Did you find a wider paper?
Somewhere stars are just your stains
Are you drawing out the edges
Of a sky that never ends
Amélie in the margins
Nineteen years in crooked lines
You kept hiding in the shadows
So the colors burned inside
Now the room is still and waiting
Pencils cold along the spine
Amélie in the margins
I keep tracing you in mine
