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annh Nov 2020

”Stood I where you, now starry and new,
Brylcreemed and cherished, view those who have perished;

The collegiate adorned, on Founder’s Day mourned,
Old souls with young dreams, bright plans and mad schemes;

Three from the left, that’s me with the clef,
A musician’s award, bestowed by the Board;

Prized above all, before the Great War,
Took hearing and sight, an aesthete’s blight;

For a whisper apart, is the end from the start,
What remains of the day, nowt but shadows that play;

On this side of the glass, through which you will pass,
At the lone piper’s call, when dusk it doth fall.”

“A cabinet of clowns dressed up in their gowns.”
Inspired by the gallery scene from Dead Poets Society - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi0Lbjs5ECI



‘O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won.’
- Walt Whitman
Momma what’s a life in shadows?
She asks the moon, because momma’s long gone.
Are they pretty, all faceless and shifting?
Or are they h a z y ?
Does the running woman in the rain believe herself a bird?
Where’s her flock momma?
Is she l o n e l y ?
Lost about the stone’s pure grain and glory?
I’m sorry you’ve got
To share yours with the sun.
Does he know, momma?
Does the sun know
About the shadows?
Maybe if he’d come down
He could keep them c o m p a n y.
I would
If I could.
Momma what’s a life in shadows?
Nickolas J McKee Nov 2020
I bide in the shadows,
Secretly writing your name.
An endless endeavor,
Never to be the same.
Cradled in times of sorrow,
I dare not long for you.
...Little time to borrow...
I hurt you to protect you,
Because I hurt myself.
...From this time it has flew...
Letting go is not enough,
So I wait in the dark.
...I know it will be rough...
Until I am seen again.
Maura Nov 2020
The veins of my eyelids
a sharp toned red
transforms into a blinding white
my eyes swivel to peak at the sun

I want the light to seep into my bones
longing to instead be a plant
slowly photosynthesizing

It would be easier perhaps,  
to whisper sweet nothings
to the wind
rather than tightening my throat
strangled by my human body
the grief never quite leaving my lips

Shadows cross my bedside  
shapes of blowing leaves tumble over
as the sun turns her head west
I watch the flurries of colors pass by
I'd be better if the sun didn't go down at 4:00p
Kerstin Oct 2020
Rotting flesh
Something isn't right
Troubling smell
Aching heart
Darkness closing in
Silence echoing loudly
Shadows claw their way through your heart
You're breathing stops
It's inching closer every second
The emptiness
Isabella Oct 2020
I sing to the shadows in my room
And play the piano to comfort my gloom
I hum in the hope that something will bloom
And write as I await my own doom
iAmNotUramaki Oct 2020
knowing the shadows are there
insisting that they are not
love has left me
love has left me lost

make me happy again, im begging
end this sadness before it ends me
imagine, right?
annh Oct 2020
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I write to right the write-less, the unvoiced compendium of my experience. A

panoply of shadows between each line and behind the fumbled words miswritten

out of loyalty to the fiction I maintain. The letters which move beneath the page,

scintillating with suggestion, leaving their impression - a glimmer here, an echo

there; they are more honest than the fraught narrative that I deem fit to 'save'. I

write to right the write-less, to balance the unwieldy, to illuminate the intangible.


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‘Every act of reading is an act of forgetting: the experience of reading is a palimpsest, in which each text partially covers those that came before.’
- James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
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