I swear,
There's nothing in
Your eyes,
No color,
Save red.
No pupils
To dilate in interest
Or at lack of light
When I whisper
At 2 AM.
Those eyelashes
Have burnt down
To a crisp
At the lids.
Forever glazed,
I can't see your love
In them
Anymore.

The younger kid
Looks at the older girl
And wonders
Why she doesn't drive yet

Why she's still riding the
School bus,

He wonders
Why her ears are plugged
So deep,
Throbbing with sounds
He can almost hear.

He wonders
Why she looks so sullen.
So somber.

At his younger age,
There's not as much
To be sad about yet.
But he doesn't know.
And she's not about to tell him.

They're separated by years
And he can't quite understand her
But she understands
Him,
wondering.
Because she used to do it too.

Is he the reason
I like poetry?
Did I adopt his taste for it
When he read me
Short, unfinished,
Alcohol-influenced
Pieces,
Reading them out in
That voice I loved,
Probably would still love
If I heard it again.
He paused slightly after
Reading the one he wrote
About me.

I didn't try my hand
At writing poems for a while,
But now they keep me safe
Like first love.

I've walked into a tunnel.
Following coats,
Dragging behind in
Abandon
The light is slitted
The shape above is
Too Close to my head.
The sharp,
Undecided angles bother me
And a nervous twitch begins.

I imagine it like a funnel,
Sorting population
To pass through in
Close quarters,
Contact guaranteed.

I sneeze
And cough.
My fever smolders
Making my skin chill,
And the thought of disease
Enters, and crowds with me,
Suffocating me to one side-
But not too close-
Don't touch anything.
Fear grows.
I am already sick
But I could get sicker.

Conspiracy drips over my thoughts,
My fever leaving the
normal functioning funnel
In my mind
To be burned away-
materializing in the city-
Around me.
My thoughts bunch
In clusters
And pass all at once,
Leaving waves of nausea
And claustrophobia
As I continue through the tunnel,
Paranoia worsening my symptoms
By the step.

Their eyes wandered,
Crowding the scene
But I averted
My own
To lend privacy
To the disaster.

Tears ran down her face
And cries were heard
And she muffled them
But the man said curtly,
Keep him crying,
It means he's alive.

What had happened
In an instant
Drew out,
As they stared
And I turned away
Thinking I was helping,
My eyes hardly probing
Like theirs.

But in the end,
I'm not the one
Who uttered reassurances
Or found the doctor.
They did.

You could say he's the sun-
Half a world away
But rays reign the distance
And his words
Encourage.
He answers my writing need
The way I need it to be answered
And has questions of his own
Is it even possible?
It might be.
I think of it
As both foolish
And beautifully simplistic
To have someone
Fall in love
With words.
And they are my words.
I am a girl who writes
In the dark,
Pen instilling
Illumination
In the stagnant depths
Of my mind.
And he is still the sun.

What if sound was robbed,
Held at gunpoint
And smuggled away
From me
Into a duffel of contraband.

What if songs became nothing?
What would I
Do? As the bus
Bounces up and down,
When the sun hasn't
Yet stolen it's kiss.
The window yields
Bland scene
And I would recognize
The silence
In the detestful
Way I do
When I forget the wires.

What if his voice
Was gone?
Could I remember it?
Could I fill in sound as his
Lips moved,
God
All I'd ever see
Would be lips.
And I don't like mouths as it is.
But maybe
They'd be my new wires
And my eyes would follow
Their parted
Movements, enamored.

What if instructions were silenced
And I was left to guess at
What to do?
Emergency situation
Stealing my life away
Because I couldn't hear
Anything about
The oxygen supply
Above my head.

I'd perish in silence.

Would I speak?
Or only write?
Would I feel heard
If I could barely fathom listening?