My feelings have a name,
yet it stays unknown, even to me.
Self-comfort is fragile-
A lonely birdsong to the soul.
But the melody sours.
The words meant to quiet the riot,
only serve to ignite it.
In the end, like all the rest,
It doesn't matter.
I want to exist the way the moon does:
seen, but never reached.
I'm a Cinderella without a missing shoe.
Every window in this soul is locked
against the chill of a memory flame.
My eyes, wistful shadow pacing the halls,
haunted by a longing my heart refuses to name.
"Do you know you're hard to love?"
a friend once asked.
I smiled. Yes, I know.
I was once like the birds,
when they hung motionless against the gale,
their feathers unruffled by frost,
as if winter were a secret they were in on.
I remember being all wings and pulse,
slanting my weight into the knife of a winter gale
to feel the hollow-boned joy of the drift.
I didn't fear the frost; I unfurled into it,
letting the bitter air cradle me
as if the cold itself were a song I was born to sing.
But now it's like I'm lying in the rain,
the solace of ache that belongs only to the mud.
I'm haunted by the ghost-flicker of that gale.
A flashback of the sky I no longer know how to hold.
Not that it matters.
It's just another word I couldn't bear to give away,
buried like a secret the self tells only to the bone.
It isn't pride, it isn't the hollow fear
of being known before I have even spoken.
It is something quieter, completely different.