You tell me to breathe
But after 19 years of breathing
Sometimes I want nothing more than to stop.
I hear whispers in the corner of my mind,
The ceaseless banging of time keeps me from sleep,
And the weight on my back has been growing lately.
I want to be Atlas,
To bear the burden of us all.
But my back would break with the world on it,
Just as it bends even now.
You say that it will all pass,
But with each round it rips me from myself,
And I can only wonder how much
Left there is of me.
I thought I could nourish you all with the tendons of my soul.
They come out of me like silk from a spider,
Like scarves from a magician’s sleeve.
But even those come from somewhere,
And even I need a bite to eat sometimes.
Not much.
A smile? The shimmer in your eye could fill me up.
But when you look away as the tug of time
Pulls the very core from me,
I collapse on the hollows of my insides.
Each time so far I’ve managed to save just a sigh,
Enough to inflate me up again. Just enough.
But one of these days you will steal my breath
And crush me at the same time.
What am I to do then?