ABOUT THE POEM: “The Ghost Heavier Than the Body” explores a grief that does not fade with time but instead gathers mass, becoming more real than the person who inspired it. The poem examines how absence can grow into a presence of its own—how someone who never loved you back can still occupy the deepest chambers of your mind. By invoking Shiva as a symbol of what exists only through disappearance, the poem reframes heartbreak as a metaphysical condition rather than an emotional event. It argues that the unreturned, the unreceived, and the unlived parts of love often shape a person more profoundly than anything they actually experienced. The poem challenges cultural biases around whose suffering counts, especially the loneliness of men whose grief is dismissed. Here, the ghost—memory, longing, the echo of what never became—outweighs the living body, and the speaker carries that impossible heaviness as his truth.

I came into this world
and fell in love.
Who do I sing this to
if you refuse to lend me your ears?

The love you woke inside me
but never let travel the full distance
from my heart to yours-
because you didn’t want it.

Now it sits here,
a living thing with nowhere to go.

What do I do with it?
How do I cage it?
How do I carry it?
How do I kill it
without killing myself?

It has been killing me for so long.
You came in so many faces and personalities
through the years of my life,
yet you always gave the same tragic reply.

I know you took something,
but you never gave it back.
In that same space,
a love for you mourns to escape.

A heart-shaped box,
seal-packed for decades,
has turned to tar-
and it eats my breath
before it reaches my blood.

What is this sorcery?
The heart is mine,
yet it aches only for you.
It nurses something that belongs to you-
a parasite you planted
and walked away from,
never caring
whether the infection spreads
and finally consumes you too.

Tell me:
if the ant is small,
is her pain tiny;
And if the god is immaculate,
is his despair monumental?
Only the loved get broken hearts,
only the rich and beautiful are mourned,
only a woman’s loss is counted real-
and a man’s grief
is worth nothing at all?

What I never received
cannot be present-
so how can it be seen?
Yet if it wasn’t the sorrow of love,
would I truly be like this?

The absence of Shiva-
the ghost of him-
weighs heavier
than Shiva ever did in his own body.

He kept watching,
acting dead,
as if checking how not to be,
as if testing who I am-
measuring the shadow
even when I wasn’t there to cast it.

His presence over time adds the weight to his form,
It becomes his moral right over time with persistence.

The ghost heavier than the body.
And the sorrow darker than the anger.

Which is body (life) is not Shiva,
what is left after death is Shiva,
and that’s the truth.

Now what is that thing which is only present when it is absent?
Shiva.
The one who is dead while he is alive.

And thus I am grief.

Only the salt in my tears
knows the pain in my heart.

I am Ronie Dinosaur.