Category: Poetry

If I cry in public

Will you believe me then?

Is the onus on me to display my vulnerability ?

Must I wear it like a badge ?

If I make myself small and weak am I then deserving of care ?

Is it the rough skin on my palms?

Is it hard to believe that words of pain are truthful from a mouth that speaks them with such assurance ?

I practice them you know

I don’t sing songs I’ve just written for fear that my crying will crush them

and I’ll never get them out

You have to pull yourself together

Or you would fall apart in front of their eyes

It is learned poise, a pretend

Strength as an artifice I made

That now I cannot end

Held like an unexploded bomb

At full arms stretch

a threat that must be neutralised

Restrained, Contained

A wild cat in need of neutering

A small unknowable thing

At both the centre and the edge of it all

The burning episcentre and a bit part player in the story of your own life

Unsure if you’re the factory floor

Or the silent partner haunting the halls at the top of the tower

Like Repunzal

After countless calls to let down her hair

she cuts it all off

Content to cocoon in her seclusion

This is a coffin or a chrysalis

For eithers sake

a prison break of sorts

Let this be the final time you steal the very words from my mouth

For now you must make your own sound in the dark

And the hallowed other ground be yours alone

To make of what you will

And still remain the memory

Of all you used to take from me

You can speak and speak

Find all your fancy ways to frame the words

But beyond the fourth wall no one is listening

Many meanings can be gleaned from the tracks of the train of your thought

You could kill yourself

trying to be understood

They can still lay the lines to bind it into lying

And you won’t even know yourself

any more

You’re too old to hold such grudges

too young to let them go

But can you be bold enough to hold your tongue this time ?

To let it all be and leave only love behind

To bend to the sway of the trees and to the warmth of the sun

And one day when you wake up with no words at all

have you lost

or have you won?