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I cannot write this poem. It keeps arriving at my door already half dead. I have tried, dozens of times, week after week, dragging the same tired words back onto the page like bodies that do not want to be found. Every line lands short, like a prayer that never learned how to leave the throat. This thing is so deep I cannot see the bottom. I tell myself I lack the art, the talent, the depth to tell the tale. So I sit here, inside a storm no one else can see, brewing in the pain, the loss, the unanswered questions that keep circling and will not land. I say I cannot communicate, but the visions do not care. They keep coming. I see it all the time. I taste the salt. My skin remembers the heat and sticky rubber, the way the sun turned everything into an oven you could never climb out of. I am here, far away from that place and not away at all, trying to translate a language made of sand and gunfire and silence. I reach for words and come up with air. What I am holding feels so small next to what I carry. I cannot write this poem, so instead I write the truth of that: I am trying to show you my wound, and all I have are trembling hands and a pen that keeps running out of ink.
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Nov 23, 2025
Nov 23, 2025 at 8:35 PM UTC
I can’t write this poem
I cannot write this poem. It keeps arriving at my door already half dead. I have tried, dozens of times, week after week, dragging the same tired words back onto the page like bodies that do not want to be found. Every line lands short, like a prayer that never learned how to leave the throat. This thing is so deep I cannot see the bottom. I tell myself I lack the art, the talent, the depth to tell the tale. So I sit here, inside a storm no one else can see, brewing in the pain, the loss, the unanswered questions that keep circling and will not land. I say I cannot communicate, but the visions do not care. They keep coming. I see it all the time. I taste the salt. My skin remembers the heat and sticky rubber, the way the sun turned everything into an oven you could never climb out of. I am here, far away from that place and not away at all, trying to translate a language made of sand and gunfire and silence. I reach for words and come up with air. What I am holding feels so small next to what I carry. I cannot write this poem, so instead I write the truth of that: I am trying to show you my wound, and all I have are trembling hands and a pen that keeps running out of ink.
#pain#history#feelings#death#gunfire#loss
PoetryIsCheating
Written by
PoetryIsCheating
Boulder, CO
Nov 23, 2025
Nov 23, 2025 at 8:35 PM UTC
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