“I don’t want you to go.”
waiting for the sunlight,
sky hangs heavy,
clotted with clouds,
every minute a drip
into the vast puddle
of waiting.
they told to run—
Just run.
how to escape
when the legs are tied
to the same place,
to the same people,
to the same whatevers.
walking in circles,
feet tracing the same path
to more waiting,
more silence.
in the room
where the walls are made of promises
that never came true.
The words, they fall
from mouths like wet leaves,
unraveling slowly,
and I cannot remember
when I stopped believing them,
but now
they stick to my skin.
Expectations—
they were something bright once,
something I could grasp,
but now they are shards
in the back of my throat,
a choking on what I cannot swallow.
I am the person
who fails them,
who fails myself,
and still I stand,
to crack the earth open
and let me breathe again.
The faces around me
are nothing but mirrors
reflecting silence.
They take,
but give nothing
but their own crumbling edges,
and I keep trying
to hold them together
as if my hands aren’t already
full of cracks.
Every touch is a weight,
a slow erosion of my own spirit,
and still,
I stay.
I stay because it is easier
than the weight
of nothing.
But in this stillness,
In this place
where no one grows,
I am caught—
and I wait,
for the moment
to swallow me whole.
Russell Lee. Movie theater. Southside, Chicago, Illinois. 1941
hello
Hi.
hey 😏
hi
The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau, 1865, Claude Monet
Sanctuary by Daniel Adams
View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems; ‘Water’ by Wisława Szymborska tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
[ID: How light the raindrop’s contents are. /How gently the world touches me.]
““You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.””
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (via hplyrikz)
What inspires you to express pain so well through words?
Pain