A fire burns strongly
in the night,
feeding off the
oxygen that leaves
my body every time
his gaze meets mine.
I see his eyes’ warmth flicker
on and off
like the filament
of a lightbulb,
turning a shade darker
when scanning the mass
then
burning brightly when
the orbs align with mine.
Nerve fibres
catch on fire, kindling
to my sweaty palms and
the shaky breath
that rattles in my chest.
A fire has started that
we cannot control,
a conflagration
that burns the room
around us,
scorching the bodies of
the occupants within.
These people are oblivious
To the blaze that
creeps up the walls,
fed by the tug of heartstrings
pulled taught with separation.
They are oblivious
to the heat
to the burn
to the pain
of two people locking eyes
across a crowded room.
sad
Nocturne
poetry
Over time,
her mouth became
a string instrument
tightened with the tension
of constraining her words.
Measures between her laughs
and ivory smiles grew longer,
each beat of silence
lingering for just
a note too long.
More often than not,
tired sandpaper lids scrape
against the white expanse
of her eyes, exposing the
red vein strings
hiding beneath;
they turn the half note circles
below into shades
of a minor key.
At night,
her heart thrums to the rhythm
of a staccato symphony:
rising, rising, rising,
as if her conductor brain
commands it -
faster, faster, faster.
Frantic thoughts
create a polyphonic sound
of worry and dejection -
melodic harmonies to the
hasty trills within her
xylophone ribcage
These sounds echo
in the acoustics of her skull
like the clicks
of an
off
beat
metronome.
Prompt: “Write about a change you have noticed in your lifetime, but write only about the things that embody or illustrate this change. It might be a change you have noticed in a friendship, in the body of a loved one, in your hometown…” (Pagh 79)
An Open Letter to a Lost Friend
poetry
I am writing this
in response to the
overwhelming hole I caused
within my own heart.
A heart that was
blackened by darkness,
shrunken and shrivelled
by the overhwhelming urge
to cast love away.
You see,
the first thing that books
never tell you about
depression
is not the loneliness
you feel inside,
(lord knows I know enough of that)
but the loneliness
it creates around you.
(The very same loneliness that made
me push you away,
afraid of exposing the darkness within.)
You may ask why I kept silent,
but what you
may never understand
is that opening up about the darkness
is far more treacherous
than keeping it hidden.
(You can wrap a cold
heart in silence
until the broken beats
disappear from fuzzy ears.)
And it is for this reason
I never told you, friend,
and for that reason
I guess our friendship
has come to an end.
I am no better now
than I was then -
my heart is barely healed,
wrapped in patchwork fabrics of
silence, loneliness, lethargy.
There are days when I wake up
without feeling awake at all.
I am constantly
drifting in a sleepy conscious,
tip toeing a line between
the light and this darkness,
wondering if anyone
would try to stop me
from plunging into the deep.
The place where
my blackened heart lay, friend,
is the place where our
friendship is buried today -
wrapped in patchwork fabrics of
my silence, regret, and anger.
I am sorry friend
for the unanswered
calls and texts,
the cancelled plans,
and the friendship
I traded for rest.
There's a lump in my throat
when I talk to you -
a painful lump that is there
because I don’t know how
to speak to you
without wanting to burst out
in apologies
and explanations.
But what you may never know
is how you still kept
the darkness at bay
even though I never
gave you a chance
to know that it existed.
So thank you
for healing my heart
without knowing its
terminal illness.