The Worldwalker

I ran through a thousand doors,
never resting —
each life a flicker, like wind through leaves 
each soul a passing flame.

A dog’s soft eyes full of knowing,
a kitchen rich with Marathi spices,
a girl with a scorpion heartbeat,
laughter and handcuffs with Brooklyn thieves,
bodies weaving into bodies, unmoored.

I wasn’t chasing places —
I was chasing him.
A shadow stitched into strangers' smiles,
a name I never heard but always knew.

The ground tilted —
houses leaning,
a city sprawling like a broken hymn below.
I ran, faster, faster,
until the world began to hum.

The sky, the earth, the air —
vibrated with a beat I had never heard,
but had always carried inside.
Aurora’s song cracked open the heavens,
Queendom come, a sound that tasted of metal and salt the anthem of something long buried waking up and
when I reached the end,
they were waiting —
the other wild girls,
bare-chested, fierce, laughing.

We danced.
We danced like wild things untamed and unbroken 
We danced like wolves that had stolen the moon.

I became the road and the runner.
I became the touch and the untouchable.
I danced where the sky remembered me
No hands could steal my fire.
No world could unmake my name.

And when the world shifted again,
and the boys grabbed at our fire,
we did not stop burning.
Even in violation, we stayed unbroken —
queens crowned by the very sky
we once ran beneath