You left…
I exhaled for the first time

When you say goodbye,
you don't mean it.
You mean "I'll see you later."
"Talk soon."
"I'll miss you."

When I say goodbye,
I'm gone.

And you can be sure
I'm never coming back.

If you were really my best friend,
you'd know that all I needed was
for you to be there for me.
I didn't need to know the truth.
I already knew I had ******* up.
I just needed you to assure me
that everything would be okay.

But instead, you were there for him,
acting like what I went through wasn't hard,
telling me how much I messed up,
assuring me that everything that happened was
my fault.

True friends don't do that.
Ex-friends do.

A hitchhiker
On the interstate of love.
It seems,
I am always hanging my thumb out
Searching for something real.
Anything real.
In what seems to me,
A very sad and ingenuine world.
Just as I thought I'd found meaning.
And for those I have loved,
Those I have left, or have gone from me
Was it your or I?

The want to be free.

There are such sweet beginnings
And there are our bitter ends.
Decades roll and crash like tides;
We live, we love, we fall aside.
Cut deep the wounds we all inflict,
Lasts long the legacy of our shame.
Left behind those broken lives,
Lost in time the reasons why.
There is such hope in our beginnings
And this the comfort at our end.

Tom Lefort June 2023.

The sadness in me is leaking out,
it’s on my foe’s hand, my friends’ arm,
I cried and I cry,
once again, those tears did not slip away.


It’s harder to breathe but you know this time- you’ll stay,
but you don’t want to.
Holding your breath in for 4 - 7 - 8 they said,
I held it in for like a minute and my body fights it-
but my body didn’t fight the chemical on the top floor,
or actually, it’s perfectly normal.
I am just a plumber who blames the leaking of the tank,
when I am the one who broke the taps,
leaking all the sadness,
splashing the blue on everyone who comes close and closer,
Blue and bluer.


The colour blue I painted is me asking for help,
silent scream, so loud- into people’s eardrums.
But somehow those who came near always got betrayed,
because I am a waste of time, a renegade, a ******* thing that fades,
even though I listen to everything they said-
but the voices in my head sang in unison
‘you are no good, the least you can do is be a nice friend to those helping hand but you’re still a needy ***** who only knows how to take but never give back’.
and I replied ‘Yeah maybe that’s true, maybe that’s right’
That’s why I should have left.


Because the truth is that I am incredibly selfish and guilty.
I am trapped between choking to death with those toxins
or splashing it out to a loved one.
At the last moment- when I was suffocating to death;
I realized that I am gonna die- I desperately begged for someone to come near
I begged them to say, to stay, not to be away.
At the same time, the voices in my head are louder
Using my mouth as a speaker,
Mouthing all the words I don’t know whether I meant to say.
Deepen into the core, choking on loved ones.


Yet again, I look at myself in despair.
Yet again, I said the same old sorry as I meant it but it means nothing.
Yet again, I crossed all the lines, I broke all the rules.
Yet again, I am blue because I hurt my close one, my closet one, my lifeline.


But in the end, what hurts me the most
is the fact that I am just another one of the bad friends,
bad employee,
bad daughter,
and also
a waste of
human being.
My intention was to survive and be good but in the end,
my action was
baseless,
useless,
worthless even.


To those who were painted with my blue,
I am sorry-
I tried but I am too full of sorrow.
I never meant to hurt you but still,
I did.
Didn’t mean to dump the whole bucket,
but you’re still wet
But rest assured that those will soonly dry,
no stains,
cos’ I shouldn’t stay.


I am deciding whether I stay or I stray,
Whether I fight or flight,
Whether I pray or I prey,
Whether I ride or rhyme,
Whether I live or laugh or love.
Hahaha, that’s too cringe.

Because
in order to live,
I must hold it in,
I must stop leaking the blue,

Because
in order to laugh,
I either find joy in my life,
or just look back at this pathetic so-called content.

Because in order to love,
I must leave.
Leaving this town,
press stop on the *******,
no more leaking the blues,
and rid me for good.

Because in order to continue this ride,
I must get better.
But here I am
rhyming the **** out of my feelings,
spraying the water that’s way too cold, it’s not chilling.

And nowadays, I pray for all of you now
because the wishes wouldn’t work for me
no more - I am too far.
I am a prey who prays and preys.

Lastly,
I am tired of the battle.
Thinking every day for a life
where I don’t have to fight
but it seems easier for me to flight.
Flight from all the circus,
the madness,
the_I-don’t-know-how-to-define or just call it life.
Flight from all of you,
my loved ones,
mon amies,
my best thing to ever happen to me
but have to bare me with a black dog that whispers my biggest insecurity


My biggest fear right now is that-
the sadness in me,
the sadness that is me.
The one that is eating me inside,
will crawl out,
eating up people I love.
Just to remind me I exist for no good,
to assure me to flight and to die.

This time, it’ll be for good.
This time, the tears will slip away.
and so will I.

I look out at my hometown,
And what is it I see?
I see a stranger,
Bearded and haggard,
Staring back at me.

Oh, my hometown,
So filled with cherished memories,
What happened to your pastures and your fields,
Your farms and your special feel?
Where I explored so deep in my formative years,
Never able to uncover all of your secrets.

Your fields are now filled,
With cookie-cutter suburbs, million-dollar home-o-ramas, and strip malls,
Your farms a distant memory,
Your pastures destroyed and paved over,
Parking for the urban refugee.

You were a place of mystery,
A home for 8 generations before me,
But now you are nothing but a hollowed-out husk,
Gutted for profit and a name.

The ones that leave us first,
Their uneven ground we ever tread.
Stumbling after each of them,
Wading through their wake.
But God forbid we take their path,
And fall hard upon such wasted life.
Fumbling for their left behinds,
Drowning in the same mistakes.

Tom Lefort - May 2023

i feel you in the dark
and i feel you in the candlelight.
i see you in the stars
and yet, i can never reach them.
you’re so close
yet so far
you dance all alone
outside the bar
by the place we first exchanged
eye contact
and i saw you in the embers of the street fires.
you gave me happiness
or even just a moment of contentment.
you gave me something tangible to feel
something genuine,
something actually real.
a figment of my imagination
you’ve become
in such short of time.
i miss the optimistic smile
that would
light up in your eyes
and i knew you felt the smoke arise
in my body
after the ravenous fire inside of me diminished.
i feel you as the curtain closes
as the locket i keep as a memorandum
shakes along with my morally stained hands.
i can’t keep a steady eye on the
realness of life.
it all fades into the blue
along with my rare smile.
i haven’t felt the wild wind pull my hair in
different directions.
are you even listening?
i haven’t seen the stars at night
only factory smoke in sight
and the dress you wore is ******
and so lonely.
i traverse through town
and always seem more bitter.
the ripped-up constitution of my
feeble institution
it just crumbles at my feet.
they can’t hear me when i breathe.
it’s as if the world is turning
into a frenzy
and i’m slowly
becoming more and more formidable.
they don’t want to knock upon my door
and they don’t want to fear me anymore.
yet i just want them to fear me more
than they ever have before.
i’m sick of finding solace in the ghost of you.
i’m sick of seeing my forcefulness multiply
into knives that stab
you from beneath your grave.
the dress you wore is ******
and so lonely.
can you teach me how to heal my wounds?
i already lost you,
i can’t lose myself.

Sitting with my father,
And a man I grew up regarding as an uncle,
Catching up and reminiscing of earlier days,
When they did something that made my heart break.

They both looked at an empty chair,
As if waiting for it to chime in,
A chair where a third man used to sit.

My father's smile grew slack,
The twinkle that was there snuffed out,
My uncle took a quick draw,
From both his cigarette and his beer,
Both sucker-punched by the old sting of grief,
Remembering their 3rd.

A mix of these two men,
The third use to be,
A man with an uproarious personality,
The kind of friend every man finds that he needs.

He was a kind soul,
A man to emulate,
Kindred to his fellows,
A rare quality you never see.

A confidant,
A sounding board,
A getaway driver,
A unique kind of breed.

They come to,
The moment shattered,
And they continue to speak.