Lost in Shade

I am a blur in the mosaic, painted, not placed
a borrowed hue in a gallery of dream and machines.
Voices whirl like prayer wheels spun too fast,
each syllable a wind that forgets my name.

Skyscrapers bloom like cold steel flowers,
rootless, like me, fed by wires, not soil.
I chase the scent of home through alleys of memory,
but find only the dust of vanished names.

My past is folded in a drawer no one opens,
forty winters pressed into brittle silence.
I carry nothing but breath and a blank refrain,
I am lost in a shaded world
But with no shade of my own.