It’s a funny kind of irony, isn’t it? When the poet, the one who should be the fiercest witness to life, chooses to linger only at its edges. Echoes of other people’s joys and griefs, tucked away inside the nib of their pen, spilling out onto the page like sunlight breaking through a shattered window. Yet, their own days pass by untouched, and the poet becomes a mirror. A mirror reflecting the world with true brilliance, but remaining transparent. Only coming alive if people stand before it.
Perhaps, this is the poet’s curse. To see too much. To feel too much. But to remain hidden. Destined only to be the lines on the page - not the words themselves. The fear of jumping in, only to drown in their own noise. So, they live on fragments: a stranger's grief glimpsed down Baker Street, the laughter of friends in the corner of a cafe, the fleeting scent of lilac in the rain.
But to live only through observation is to risk losing oneself. The poet becomes too comfortable with the safety of those edges. Emotions remain unsettled, life remains untested.
The poet is only a shadow - present in the verse, absent in life.
Yet, there is a strange sort of beauty to be found in this distance. For their refusal to step closer, the poet preserves something untouchable; unshaped, unfiltered. Every borrowed moment and stolen glance fused into one single voice. Perhaps, this is not an absence, but rather a careful preservation - the poet holding the world tenderly in their hands, shaping it without intervening.
Maybe the truth of life is found not only in living, but in noticing.
Because after all, what is life if there is no one there to witness it?
The Prologue to a new book in the works