What We Leave Uncounted
I once kept careful records:
sunrise times, borrowed hours,
the way morning leaned against the glass
before deciding to enter.
Ink thinned at the margins.
Light refused to stay put.
Between coffee and the next obligation
I noticed small debts accruing:
a birdcall unentered,
the pause before a train moved,
breath lent back and forth
between people who loved each other.
One day I wrote only this:
Nothing owed if nothing is measured.
The page turned on its own.
She Draws Places She Hasn’t Been
She says she can sketch the world
by memory alone:
not where she’s traveled,
but where longing has passed through.
Salt flats. Clay hills.
Cities whose roofs break light
into smaller, workable hopes.
At night she folds the paper
until it fits her palms.
Unmarked regions hum.
Rivers curve back, refusing certainty.
Every map is an argument, she says.
Every border a story told twice.
Sometimes the only true direction
is the one you invent to survive.
Things Still Waiting to Be Finished
A clock hand slides past regret.
The notebook corner stays folded.
Two glasses touch in an empty room:
sound lingering longer than intention.
A pencil breaks mid-sentence.
The page reads: Begin here,
written just above midnight.
Rain gathers. Hesitates.
Then chooses the gutter
over the sky.
Amateur Fossils of the Sleepless Night
If dreams left bones
I would sift them gently
from the sheets.
A rib of moonlight.
The hinge of a voice
saying goodbye incorrectly.
I arrange them on the nightstand,
trying to reconstruct a body
that knew how to stay.
Morning clears the field again.
Only a few fragments remain:
enough to prove
something once lived here.
Instructions for Listening to Silence
Silence is not empty.
It hums behind the walls,
tuning itself.
Listen,
the room is an instrument
waiting for your stillness.
Pause long enough
and the sound appears:
a low note
that already knows your name.
*****
David Anson Lee is a poet and physician whose work explores perception, time, and the quiet intersections between the inner and outer worlds. His poems have appeared in Litbreak Magazine and numerous other literary journals. He lives and writes in Texas.