Gate Fate Plate

Gate gate late fate. Always a gate in the way. You don’t notice until you try to move. Keeper creeper reaper, doesn’t matter, they blur into one face if you stare too long. The latch clicks.

Gatekeeping, that’s the word. Don’t belong, don’t qualify, not pure. Funny, purity’s the filthiest idea I know. Velvet rope tied around nothing and we still line up for the wafer.

Maybe time keeps it. Seconds stacked like bricks, hours welded shut. Tick tick tick—the sound of the microwave reheating last night’s pizza slice or the bouncer’s flashlight snapping on. No passage without a wristband. No tomorrow without today. No end without—

Or maybe words keep it. Words retort. You name the thing and the thing shrinks. Tree becomes cross, forest becomes burden, love becomes vow.

I see the guard, tall, faceless, keys jangling like change in a dryer. He’s smiling. Not because he won’t let me pass but because there was never a door. Only palms pressed against air. Only a silence that doesn’t answer.

Gate fate plate. The rhyme holds like a handrail. I walk it. I laugh. The keeper dissolves when I stop keeping. The gate collapses when I stop believing. And sometimes, in the quiet, I still hear that latch click.