MyShadowedwords

The Cicadas Call

September hangs in amber through the trees,
While cicadas tear the thinning afternoon;
Their ragged chorus rides the cooling breeze,
As though they know their summer ends too soon.
They scream into a world that will not stay,
Remember me. I lived. I was here today.

Their empty shells cling loosely to the bark,
Like little ghosts of lives already spent;
While daylight fades a little earlier into dark,
And every note feels almost heaven-sent.
They do not know how brief their voices are—
They simply burn their borrowed lives beneath a star.

Their wings are glass against the September light,
Their bodies trembling with an ancient need;
They fill the trees with one enormous cry,
As though existence itself were something to plead.
And listening, I could almost hear my own—
A human heart demanding not to die alone.

For we emerge from places no one sees,
From buried rooms beneath the self we hide;
We climb like cicadas through the summer trees,
Leaving old identities behind.
We shed our shells and call the shedding growth,
Then spend our lives explaining what we both know.

We speak through laughter, anger, touch, and art,
Through midnight messages and words unsaid;
Yet underneath the language lives the heart:
Please see the thing I cannot make you read.
We want our private storms translated into light,
Want someone to enter darkness and get it right.

So I chased the ears that might decipher me,
Mistaking recognition for release;
I thought another's eyes could make me free,
Could silence every argument inside my peace.
Each unanswered question tightened like a thread,
Until I lived more in their minds than in my head.

Then one September evening, cool and clear,
The cicadas rose like static from the ground;
Their dying chorus pressed against my ear,
A thousand desperate engines making sound.
And suddenly I heard beneath their cry
The voice I'd been outrunning every night: Why?

Why must another person witness me
Before I believe that I have truly been?
Why must their understanding be the key
To every locked and wounded room within?
Why had I made another's comprehension
The judge and jury of my own existence?

The question cracked something I had built,
Not loudly—not with thunder, but with grace.
I felt the architecture of my guilt
Collapse without a hand upon the place.
The cage was not the silence of their reply;
It was my need to make their understanding justify.

I had mistaken being known for being whole,
Mistaken being heard for being healed;
I'd handed strangers maps to my soul
And wondered why the territory was never revealed.
But no one else could walk those roads for me,
No one could become the witness I needed to be.

The cicadas did not ask the fading sun
To explain why their summer had to end.
They did not curse the autumn for what it had done,
Or beg the dying warmth to stay and mend.
They simply sang until the singing ceased—
And somehow, that surrender looked like peace.

So I let the ego loosen from my chest,
Like a cicada shell releasing from the tree;
I stopped demanding someone understand me best,
Stopped making their perception a verdict on me.
And when I finally abandoned that plea,
The mind that trapped me opened—and let me be.

September deepened. The chorus thinned.
One voice disappeared, then one more after that.
The leaves began their quiet work of turning,
And dusk laid silver over every path.
What once sounded like desperation in the trees
Became a lesson whispered into me.

I learned that I can ache without an audience,
Love without requiring love returned;
I can carry my own unanswered questions
Without making every silence something earned.
I can be misunderstood and still remain—
A whole human being untouched by someone else's frame.

Now when cicadas scream beneath September skies,
I don't hear a plea demanding someone care.
I hear existence spending what it has before it dies,
A brief and beautiful disturbance in the air.
They sing because they are alive—not to be known,
And I have learned to do the same on my own.

The final voices fade into the night,
Their ancient song dissolving into stars;
The trees become more spacious in the quiet,
And silence no longer feels like scars.
I gave up the hunger to be understood,
And found my mind becoming still—as it should.

I do not need another's eyes to prove
The shape of who I am beneath my skin;
I do not need the world to hear me move
To know the life that quietly begins.
I released the need to be witnessed, and somehow, free,
I stopped searching for myself in everyone—and finally found me.

Jonathan Phelps

This one is almost a year old and still one of my favorites. Original in the photo. Newest edit in writing.

Edited 7/22/2026

The Breathe Between Eternities

Breathe deep—the stars whispered you awake,
The hush of the void is broken and stirred,
Where silence ends, the quantum pulses break,
Now every breath turns from atoms to word.
The cosmos begins to sing in dialects of dust,
Verse forged from nothingness with gravity and trust.

Let go—the past is a dead stars' light at best,
The ghost of photons racing just to appear,
It's images still glowing from unrest,
Then stripped of mass if met with fear.
When you chase reflections on a pool of glass,
You find no future if tethered to the past.

This moment— stitched from interstellar thread,
The filament that hums beneath your skin,
Unwritten scripts from stars that have bled,
A page in time the gods forgot to spin.
The pulse you feel is not yours alone,
It’s carved in the rings of Saturn’s icy throne.

You, the breath constellations keep,
A blink between creation and decay,
A dream the universe created in sleep
Now lost by the breaking of the day.
Yet in the moment, its fleeting, raw, and true,
The whole of time it's collapsing onto you.

Remind yourself—this moment holds the key,
Not clocks, nor plans, or legacy we fabricate,
But this—this breath—this fragile clarity,
Not luck, nor fear, nor some celestial fate.
It’s here, it’s now, and nowhere else remains,
A stillness born from the stars in your veins.

Let the future burn just beyond your reach,
And let the past erode like ancient stone.
The present is the only thing to learn or teach—
A sacred flame that flickers when alone.
Breathe in the dark, know it speaks your name,
Know it lights the void and tames the flame.

Jonathan Phelps

Highway without a Finish

We crown the dawn with banners none can truly claim as day,
Then lash our names to engines forged from appetite and fire;
Mistaking every mile for laurels history might display,
We feed the road with restless breath, yet never quench desire.
For life is not a circuit where one victor stands alone;
It is a highway without end, indifferent as stone.

Ahead, another silhouette forever claims the lane,
A farther light, a swifter wheel, another height to scale;
The horizon breeds new distances from every measured gain,
While triumph folds like paper maps before the endless trail.
No soul inherits first place from the arithmetic of speed;
The road invents new frontiers faster than our feet can lead.

We overtake a hundred ghosts, then curse the one before our eyes,
As though the world were narrower than longing's sharpened edge;
We never see the amber fields where quiet kingdoms rise,
Nor hear the rivers writing psalms beneath the granite ledge.
The meadow keeps no ledger of who reached the bend before;
It only offers beauty to the traveler who looks once more.

The mountains lean like patient monks in weather-woven gray,
Their silence older than the crowns our fevered hands pursue;
Yet we reduce eternity to minutes thrown away,
And barter constellations for applause that will not do.
What empire has the sunset lost because it came in second light?
What rose has ever envied dawn for owning morning's sight?

The forests breathe in cathedrals no stopwatch can contain,
Each cedar keeps a century imprisoned in its rings;
Yet we accelerate through seasons only measuring the strain,
Too deaf to hear the sermon every common sparrow sings.
We sought to master distance with a tire's impatient cry;
The distance gently mastered us while beauty wandered by.

And when at last the engine stills beneath the evening sky,
No judge in robes will ask how many strangers you surpassed;
They'll ask what wonder filled your lungs, what mercy caught your eye,
What love remained beside you when ambition's echo passed.
For every road remembers not the fastest at the wheel;
It keeps the souls who learned that seeing is the greater zeal.

So loosen envy from your hands; let haste unlearn its claim,
Permit the wind to tutor you in gentler kinds of worth;
The highway never asked of us to glorify a name,
But simply bear astonishment across the waiting earth.
The richest traveler is not the one who vanished from our sight;
It is the one who found the world unfolding left and right.

Jonathan Phelps

The Geometry of What Remains

There is a mathematics older than the stars,
a theorem etched where broken comets kneel to pray;
it whispers every orbit bears invisible scars,
that gravity remembers what has drifted away,
while light itself must carry wounds across the dark,
long after heaven has forgotten every spark.

You left six words beneath my windshield like thin snow,
fragile enough to melt beneath a single breath:
"I love you. I am sorry."—winter's afterglow,
a candle trying to negotiate with death.
But language bankrupts when the soul remains unpaid;
even forgiveness casts an uncompromising shade.

So I returned no blade, no sermon born of pride,
only a mirror polished by unbearable years;
for rivers cannot cleanse the mountain from inside,
nor can repentance bloom while nourished by old fears.
A bridge is not repaired by sketching where it stood;
it rises only where the timber still is good.

Then silence came—not empty, but cathedral-deep,
its vaulted ceiling built from all you did not say;
I heard entire civilizations fall asleep
beneath the ash of one more unresolved today.
No answer reached me, yet the quiet understood
what thunder never could.

For I had loved you as the coastline loves the sea,
accepting every tide that stole its very name;
mistaking my endurance for our destiny,
believing every loss would circle back the same.
Yet oceans never promise what their waves suggest;
they simply teach the shore the discipline of rest.

I know now: every soul must lift its private stone,
must wrestle with the angel hidden in its own night;
no borrowed courage ever built another's home,
no second heartbeat taught the first to choose the light.
I could have walked beside you to the mountain's crest—
I never could have climbed it in your stead.
And still, I bless the season written in your eyes.
The forests burned, yet somehow taught the roots to see;

the phoenix is not born because the old bird dies—
it rises only when the ash consents to be.
What I mistook for ending was a hidden door,
through which I walked less broken than the man before.
So if your silence was the final thing you gave,
it was enough to teach what echoes never could:
that love is not the duty of the endlessly brave,
nor sacrifice the highest form of human good.
Some people enter us like scripture carved in flame;
we leave not with their future—only with our name.

I carry neither vengeance nor a beggar's plea.
The stars owe nothing to the night that made them burn;
I simply learned that what survives is dignity,
the quiet art of knowing when not to return.
I loved you fully. That remains forever true.
The only heart I could not heal was never mine to.

Jonathan Phelps

What Remains Unmended

I still recall the map your silence drew through night,
Where constellations bent to justify our pain;
I carried stars as though persistence summoned light,
While every dawn returned with heavier forms of rain.
Love is not measured by how long one learns to bleed;
Nor is devotion proof that only I must plead.

You left a note—six fragile words against my door,
A paper bridge suspended over years of glass;
I answered not with anger, only asking for more:
Not promises, but truth that finally could last.
The silence that returned said everything it knew;
Some echoes are confessions spoken without you.

I love you still. That fact survives beyond my will,
Like ancient mountains keeping fossils of the sea;
But love alone cannot persuade a wound to heal,
Nor teach abandoned roots to become a living tree.
If there is work to save what once was ours to tend,
It cannot start where I have already reached my end.

So now I stand where mercy intersects with dust,
Unsure if broken temples ought to rise once more;
For faith is not the absence of intelligent distrust,
But knowing when to leave unopened one last door.
If we are meant to build, the first stone is not mine—
I have already carried enough to call it love through time.

Jonathan Phelps

Stay away

Sometimes I feel the universe is done with me—
A blackened ledger drowned beneath the sea.
Each soul arrives with ruins in their eyes,
Like burnt-out saints still dressed in alibis.
And every kiss feels less like fate than debt,
A contract signed in blood and cigarette.

I’m tired of tracing scars like ancient maps,
Of hearing how the light in people snaps.
They hand me tragedies like sacred wine,
Then ask me not to notice they’re divine.
Meanwhile I sew my own wounds shut with thread,
And smile politely while something starves instead.

Love now resembles forensic arithmetic,
An autopsy performed in candlewick.
You learn the shape of every childhood ghost,
The thing that broke them first, the thing that hurts the most.
And all the while you guard your own abyss,
Like one more wrong confession could kill bliss.

Because the heart becomes a liability—
A loaded gun disguised as intimacy.
I no longer know if closeness can redeem
Or if connection is a fever dream.
But God, I miss believing people stay,
Before survival taught my soul decay.

Jonathan Phelps

Everywhere but Nowhere

I stitched my shadow through the ribs of rain,
And taught the mirrors how to speak your name;
Now every dusk will resurrect my stain,
Like scripture burned but whispering the same.
You’ll find my ghost in chandeliers of smoke,
In every vow the sleepless heavens spoke.

I buried pieces of myself in walls
Where candlelight decays to shades of blue;
The frost will carry echoes through your halls,
And every silence will pronounce me true.
Though I am ash unheld by human hands,
I’ll bloom like rot beneath your sacred lands.

The stars themselves will learn my cadence cold,
Their silver mouths repeating what you fled;
And oceans, black as crowns on kings of old,
Will drag my memory through your marriage bed.
You’ll curse the moon for carving me in tide,
Yet drink my absence like a poisoned pride.

For vengeance is not fury, nor the knife—
It is the haunting gravity of loss;
To be erased from touch, yet stain a life,
Like winter ivy strangling marble cross.
I will be everywhere your damned eyes roam,
But nowhere left for you to call a home.

Jonathan Phelps

The Geometry of a Good Man

He learns the weight of quiet in the way he stands,
Not loud with virtue, but precise in what he gives,
A measured grace that moves through open, working hands,
As if the act itself defines the way he lives.
No trumpet marks the places where his mercies start,
Only the steady architecture of his heart.

He speaks as though each word must answer to his name,
With edges honed to truth, yet tempered not to scar,
For language, in his care, is neither tool nor game,
But something sacred—bridging who we are.
He knows that strength is not a voice that overbears,
But one that chooses when to listen, and who cares.

He walks with patience braided tightly through his days,
A discipline of calm beneath the shifting strain,
Not blind to hurt, nor numbed by time’s eroding ways,
But fluent in the dialect of others’ pain.
And when he laughs, it is not careless or rehearsed,
It sounds like rain on drought, like something long-immersed.

The Custody of the Heart

He tends his inner life the way a garden’s grown,
With ruthless gentleness toward weeds that twist and climb,
Refusing rot to root in corners left alone,
Yet knowing even shadows have a use in time.
Forgiveness is the water he returns to most,
A quiet rite that frees the keeper and the ghost.

He holds no ledger etched with injury or slight,
No archive of offenses sharpened into stone,
For grievance is a thief that starves the inward light,
And binds a man to burdens not his own.
So he releases what would anchor him in place,
And finds in letting go a more enduring grace.

Reflection is his mirror, polished without shame,
He studies motive’s grain, the fibers of intent,
Not to condemn, but to refine the inner flame,
To see what each decision truly meant.
For clarity is earned where honesty is due,
And self is something built in what we choose to do.

The Paradox of Kindness

He offers kindness not as currency or plea,
But as a principle that does not ask return,
Aware that some will test its tensile integrity,
Mistaking warmth for something they can burn.
Yet still he gives, not out of naivety or need,
But from a deeper law than profit or concede.

For kindness is not fragile—it is forged and tried,
A tempered will that does not fracture under scorn,
A strength that does not swell with ego or with pride,
But stands the same in praise as it does worn.
He knows the world may take and seldom comprehend,
Yet chooses still the way that does not have to bend.

His heart—a citadel, not closed, but wisely made,
With gates that open freely, not to every claim,
He guards its fire without allowing it to fade,
Nor lets intrusion redefine its flame.
Discernment is the balance he has come to keep,
Between the vows we honor and the wounds we reap.

The Light He Leaves

He does not chase the echo of a fleeting praise,
Nor measure worth by eyes that seldom truly see,
But walks a line of purpose through his given days,
Aligned with something deeper than decree.
And in a world where shadows often cloud the way,
He is not loud—but constant as the break of day.

For being good is not a summit to attain,
But something lived in increments, refined by choice,
A thousand unseen acts that quietly remain,
Long after louder virtues lose their voice.
And when he’s gone, no monument may mark his span—
But lives made lighter will attest: he was a man.

Jonathan Phelps

The Discipline of Silence

There is a silence sharper than a blade at rest,
It hums between the walls like something kept at bay,
A quiet that arrives once you have done your best,
And finds no echo left in all you tried to say.
You sit inside a life that should have let you in,
And hear the hollow proof beneath your careful skin.

You followed every rule they carved in tempered stone,
Kept low, worked hard, became the man you had to be,
Mistook endurance for a seed that might be sown,
Believed that time would bloom into reciprocity.
But clocks don’t pity hands that circle endlessly,
And effort is no key to human gravity.

The phone remains a relic, mute upon the stand,
A monument to numbers never meant to call,
No voice arrives to reach across and understand,
No sudden warmth to break the stillness in the hall.
They say, “Just lift the weight, go place yourself out there,”
As if iron could replace the absence of a stare.

As if a barbell knows the language of a touch,
Or mirrors can reflect a presence not your own,
As if the body, shaped and disciplined enough,
Could trick the soul into believing it’s not alone.
But some have never known what others take as air—
The simple, quiet proof that someone chooses care.

And loneliness itself is not the deepest scar,
It’s not the empty bed or silence thick with night,
It’s when you lay your wanting down exactly where you are,
And cease to argue hope into another fight.
When even self-deception finally resigns,
And truth stands still between the margins of your mind.

No longer do you dress the void in hopeful lies,
No longer wait to be selected from the blur,
You see yourself reflected in unseeing eyes,
A passing shape, a name that does not quite occur.
To be an option is to almost be erased,
A shadow taught to linger just outside of place.

So brick by careful brick you build what will not bend,
A structure born from all the doors that never moved,
You make a home where no one enters, not a friend,
A fortress where the need to need is slowly removed.
Not broken—no, but tempered past the point of plea,
A man who taught his hunger how not to be.

And they will call you distant, strange, or closed-off,
They’ll diagnose the quiet you have come to keep,
But they have never paid the long, compounding cost
Of teaching starving hearts the discipline of sleep.
You did not choose the absence that you now defend—
You only chose the way you’d learn to let it end.

Jonathan Phelps

Watering your own Grass

Two stubborn souls at the edge of ordinary days,
Where bills and weather test the bones of hope—
They do not swear life will mend its crooked ways,
They only say, with you, I think I can cope.
No violins, no spectacle to prove its worth—
Just two who choose each other in the quiet of the earth.

Love isn’t chandeliers or silver-tongued display,
But socks matched slowly in the amber light;
A meme sent softly when there's no words to say,
Two tired hearts still loving through the fight.
Not loud like thunder rolling from above—
More like the hush that says, I’m still here, my love.

They know the map is written rough and wild,
That storms will visit rooms they thought were safe;
They know each heart still carries something child,
Something stubborn, something prone to chafe.
Yet wisdom lives inside the vow they keep—
The road is hard, but good things don't come cheap.

Temptation whispers from the greener hill,
A thousand easier gardens in the sun;
But love is hands in soil that won’t sit still,
Watering the ground two lives have spun.
Not wandering where borrowed blossoms grow—
But tending what is theirs, and letting their own roots show.

So what is love when every myth is through?
Not perfect peace or days without demand—
But two who look at life’s long avenue
And choose to walk it hand within worn hand.
No matter how the winds above may roam—
Life may be hard… but you are where I build my home.

Jonathan Phelps