Malta · Long Stay · A Place to Begin Again (Poem)

He came to Malta for reasons
too small to name.

Stayed longer than the reasons.

He looked for love the way men follow light —
always just past the edge,
always almost arrived.

Malta gave him stone and heat and scar,
dust settling in the throat
like something unfinished.

His mind ran young while his body kept the count.
He picked a fight
with someone who deserved it less than he thought.

Face down on limestone
he understood what the island had been trying to say:
the war was not outside.

So he let the sea receive him.

Dropped below the surface.
Spoke to urchins in the undertow
as if they were old correspondents.
Let the body find its depth
where the mind had only made noise.

He rented a flat in the middle of the Med.
Drank the coffee. Watched friends
arrive like weather, dissolve like weather.
Walked the Valletta walls alone at night,
the stone still warm from a sun
that owed no one anything.

Looked under sea-glass, under silence,
under whatever still held light.

Some nights the sky had nothing to prove
and the two parts of him
grew quiet long enough to meet —

the agitated,
the still —

and what passed between them
was not happiness
but something rarer:
the ceasing of the argument.

Old dust and salt. The mind
no longer lunging at everything it passed
like a man who has confused
motion with living.

He turned.
He looked.
He found the last disguise —

himself,
patient as the rock,
waiting to be recognised.

It came and went.
Some nights all appetite and noise,
the old hungers bright as ever.
under the stars  – above Malta,
back to the beginning,
back to the fall,
and start again.

Not to silence.
Not to escape.

But to bear himself home —

to love the one who remained
when all the wanting
finally
grew quiet.