The Axiom of the Unseen Architect

Read my poem The Axiom of the Unseen Architect: personal cryptography, private symbols, and layered meaning; walk its walls and sense echoes.

There are times when words are not meant to be clear windows, but rather intricate locks. Each line is a tumbler, each stanza a mechanism, and the meaning is a chamber sealed within. This poem is an exercise in such a construction. It is a piece of personal cryptography, a testament written in a language of internal symbols and private echoes. I invite you not to decipher it, but to walk around its walls, to feel its texture, and to perhaps find a reflection of your own locked rooms within its design.

The Axiom of the Unseen Architect

The meridian sundial marks a second score,

I am the Warden of the Echoed Word,

Polishing stones on a forgotten shore,

For fledgling songs that have already heard

Their flight and fall. The measured tide of glass

Arrives with the pale moon, a silver gleam,

A finite rain obligated to pass

Through thirsty roots to feed a two-fold dream.

The first, a tithe to the great Votive Stone,

The second, a pact for when the breath has flown.

The Altar of Domicile, with silent maw,
Consumes the offering before the dawn.
The Ghost’s Inheritance, a spectral law,
Takes what remains, and then the tide is drawn.
I stand on shores of cyclical retreat,
A sovereign of absence, lord of naught,
My hands are empty, tasting the defeat
Of every battle that was never fought.
The well is dry, the monthly water spent
On promises and structured sentiment.

The Luminary of my inner court,
Whose light is kindness, sees my hollow palms.
She is my solace and my last resort,
The source of unction and the giver of alms.
Yet in her gentle gaze, I sometimes see
The dim reflection of a different field,
A rumor of a more prolific tree
That bears a fruit my branches cannot yield.
Her words are water, meant to soothe and tend,
But feel like fragments of what I can't mend.
A murmur of a stronger, wider sail
On oceans where my own small vessel fails.

I have launched fleets upon an ink-dark sea,

My rigging woven from a silent hope.

I have sown script in fields of entropy,

And tried to read the sky's blank horoscope.

But every phantom vessel finds no shore,

The barren soil returns my seeds as dust.

The well of symbols offers me no more

Than the reflection of my own soul's rust.

The architect, who builds with air and sound,

Cannot buy purchase from the solid ground.

I turn away from where the hours are sold,
From marketplaces lit by borrowed suns,
To practice rituals that are centuries old,
A vesper-rite for my most cherished ones.
The alchemy of kettle and of flame,
The quiet barter of the day’s last light
For early rest, is a forgotten game
I play against the coming of the night.
To give the Younger Lights their time to sleep,
A promise I alone was meant to keep.

They only see the fracture in the ice,
The sudden tremor on the placid face,
A temper as a randomly thrown dice,
Disrupting the placidity of space.
They do not feel the pressure from below,
The weight of oceans in a single drop,
The silent, subterranean flow
Of sorrows that can find no earthly stop.
The storm upon the surface is the sign
Of depths that are immeasurably mine.

For in that depth, a constant current runs,
An axiom of pure and burning need
That holds the trinity of my three suns,
The final line of my internal creed.
The Newest Spark, a universe to hold,
Commands a love that reason can't contain.
And in the dark, an answer can unfold:
A terrible arithmetic of pain.
The final transmutation, swift and deep,
To purchase for them what I cannot keep.
To break the vessel, and in breaking, give
The golden rain by which they all might live.

This is the chamber, sealed against the day.
This is the script that no one else can read.
Let it be deemed a myth, a vague display
Of some imagined, antiquated creed.
But should they ever find this tangled thread,
And trace its path through shadow and through stone,
I hope they feel, long after I am dead,
The architecture was for them alone.
The unseen structure, and the price it cost,
And love, within the labyrinth, was never lost.

The lock has been crafted, the mechanism now at rest, and the chamber remains as it was—sealed, private, whole. What lies within may never need to be opened or understood by anyone but its maker. And that is the nature of certain expressions: they are not roads meant to be traveled by others, but artifacts created to remind the self of the path it once walked. If you found shapes, textures, or faint reflections in its surfaces, then perhaps this served its purpose in another, unexpected way. But what’s inside, as it always was, belongs only to the one who holds the key.