Revisionist Poetry – Creepy Island, v.3

From the river’s throat a dock-less spine of earth
juts—an island stitched to rumour.
Moonlight stitches the reed-edges with wire,
and the black water stitches back, slow and smooth.

Windows that never lit keep their dark,
a rowboat hung with three small shirts like flags.
At the wharf, old men trade the same two words:
“Once,” and then the silence swallows their mouths.

Midnight is a watchman who does not blink;
it writes names on the far side of the bank.
We cross in story only — never the shallows —
because what waits there keeps the shape of somebody we once loved.