There is a silence here.
One that beats within me,
A second heart,
With none of the love.

My throat aches,
Voiceless cries going unheard.
The quiet is consuming,
Yet there is nothing here.

How can there be nothing?
When all that I’ve wanted
Could not be closer?

I know.
Because I do not want you
Not anymore.
Your silence, your quiet,
Is consuming.
It has eaten me
And left nothing behind.

My heart beats inside me
Does it truly?
Yes, I think so
But my chest doesn’t rise
And my lungs don’t breathe.

Here, crack my ribs,
Reach your hand inside,
Trace your fingertips
Along the veins of my heart.
Does it beat?
For you, it does.

This gaping hole
Buried in my chest
It wishes to meet
And be met by
All the love I’ve seen
But I’m alone today
And I’ll be alone overmorrow
Because my hole is too deep.

Anger is a foul thing
Bitter in the teeth
And rough in the throat.
A tongue, coated in black,
Spitting the scraping tar.

You invoked this of me.
You chanted the spells
And danced the pentagram
And pulled this rage from deep,
Up to the light of your new hell.

Death has long fingers, they say,
Wrapped around her world
Like cobwebs around flies
And skin around bones.

She has wide eyes, they say,
Watching our world and waiting
Like a dumb lamb, young but too old,
Wondering why you have a knife.

Death knows things, they say,
Like how your mother screamed
And your father cried
How your brother fainted
And your sister stared
At your wrist laying
Among the ****** leaves.

I am so very weak.
Times and choices get hard
And my options are run away,
Or build a mask so well
That it becomes my face

I don’t see a present
Past and future are all in my eyes,
The rest unthought, never will be.
It is safety this way,
Better than being too present.

I still own hope
It is still inside my feet
But I float apart, separated,
Made only of ribbons from my mask,
Each decision calculated by fear

I cannot choose between two
Hope and fear
One is a luxury
The other a necessity
I am too poor to afford either
So I carve masks of stolen fear
And pretend myself rich

I want a kind person to see me struggling
Not by me showing them
But by simply observing
And care
And ask if they can help
Sometimes they can
And sometimes they can't
But that itself
Is enough for my heart