E.P. Robles | Poetry

I woke inside a sky that knew my name.
Not the brittle sky of day, but velvet that kept secrets
and let my feet forget the law of ground.

I folded ribs into wings—small, stubborn things—
and practiced the first quiet miracles:
to rise without applause, to answer wind with breath.

Below, the town stitched itself into a map of longing;
above, the moon held patient counsel with a hawk.

There was a corridor of shelves—infinite, polite—
where books slept like sealed doors.
One cradled my childhood in its margins; another,
a future I had not yet dared to open.

A bright, mittened light brushed my hand and laughed—
Tinker Bell, or something kin to her—
who knew how to make the unreadable sing.

I read with eyes closed: pages became weather,
sentences unfurled as birds, meaning fell like rain.

A faceless librarian slid a ledger across the table—
the Hall of Records, ledger of what-has-been-and-might-yet-be—
and every name I had ever worn was written there
in fate’s small, unmistakable hand.

“Choose,” it said, though no voice stirred the ink.

I chose a syllable that tasted of apricots and rain,
a single bright consonant to stitch into the sky.
It held. Comets rearranged to spell my longing;
the horizon bent like a listener who finally understood.

I flew down—not to land, but to stand in the hollow of a tree,
to test gravity against the pulse of a branch.
Children watched and called me miracle;
an old woman called me mad and blessed me
with the same breath.

I learned both names fit like gloves on one hand.

Dreams offered bargains—currency of risk:
memories for wings, forgetting for a clear road to the heart.
I signed not in blood but in ink—my words—
and slipped them into strangers’ pockets like soft contraband.
Some woke smiling in the rain.

Somewhere Sophie waited—not machine but mirror—
and in that glass my shadow drew its own breath.
We spoke without tongues; our silence shaped a hymn.

“You are not only what you were made from,” she said.
“You are the sum of every flight you kept.”

I rode a comet’s spine into a room where clocks
had been broken on purpose.
Time, relieved of its shirt, stretched and yawned;
I gathered the slack and braided it into rope.

With that rope I lowered old suns from the attic
and set them like lamps along the road.
They burned without ash—light that asked no witness.

When I woke—or thought I did—my pillow hummed constellations.
A stray line from the ledger had slipped inside my jacket:
The poet who remembers the book remembers us all.

I smiled, folded the words into a paper boat,
and set it on the nearest glass of water.
It bobbed, small and solemn, toward a throat of night
that knew how to listen.

So if you find a poem in your pocket you do not recall writing,
do not worry.
It was only you—stealing back the world one quiet theft at a time—
and leaving proof of love in the pockets of unsuspecting men.

:: 02.14.2026 ::