Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Even here, miles from town,
Joshua trees raise twisted arms,
like dancers locked in a song’s last note.

I lower myself,
not as a hero in the final act
but as an old father grown tired,
disc inflamed in the back,
knuckles scraped, work
too new for such an old body.

My youth spent bent in labor,
family cut away in anger.
Before I rot away in some churchyard,
I kneel with the fool’s wish
that the spring could wash it all from me.

The sun drags its red spine
across the ridge.
Stone steadies my shoulders in its cool grip
I dissolve into cloud,
a child warmed in arms of water,
its breath rising around me like ghosts.

Rain breaks, sudden and brief.
Creosote exhales its sly, eternal smell.
A cairn rises from the sand,
stones balanced without name-
its long shadow
measures this sand in silence.

Alkali on skin,
sulfur edge to air,
dust on tongue.

Gravity presses,
bone across rock,
and heat seams my back-
a mercy scraped thin,
hours from the outskirts.

A mountain hangs upside down
on the pool’s surface.
I drink not my reflection,
but the earth’s fire gone gentle.
Yashkrit Ray Sep 7
The surroundings's drenched
Fallen leaves and trees shiver
And the last drop falls
thelastdrop
Andy Chunn Sep 4
A silent scream cannot be seen
Nor captured within our hearing
It lies inert somewhere between
Our normalcy and our fearing

A silent scream is colored green
When envious matters may strike
And one so preen becomes so mean
With quiet rage and hate alike
4AM-
a boy runs across
the four-lane roadway,

eyes like rare stones,
face burlap-creased dust,
jean shorts, a dolphin backpack
meant for someone smaller.

I track in my car,
take the exit that curves
around an abandoned encampment.

I find cement steps,
but the boy is gone.

Only smoke remains:
a hooded figure curled
in a doorway of a derelict building,
an empty tent split by knife.

The world recedes,
layered, unbroken.

another vision settling
into the mind,
a thick silence I fold
into the others.
Lance Remir Sep 4
And every night
I asked myself
The same question
"When will I stop thinking about you?"
And every night
Every answer
Silence
Cheyenne Sep 3
--  In silence  --
The dream reel unwinds its thread.
---
And the heart,
like a  l  o  o  m,
slowly weaves the thread.
---
The dreamer tried to reach for that thread,
but
          F
                 E
                        L
                                L
                                                                      And never found her way
                           back to
H   O   P   E


                                                                                            ---Michael Slade
Maria Aug 31
Leave me alone. I want it really much.
No explanations or hard feelings
I won’t answer anything. I’ll just keep quiet.
And please, forgive my broken bearing.

I am so tired of other problems,
And silly fuss and needless dramas.
I just want silence! You hear me? Silence!
And not in whisper, but stone-dead! Yes!

I don’t want dramas with you any more.
I’m sick of arguments at nights at all.
And that’s enough of all these ******, base-league fool quips.
No words are needed. Please, be quiet in whole.

Please, just forget me for a day.
And if forever, I will never sorrow.
I am not here. I’m emptiness for all.
I’m tired and done. I won’t be back tomorrow.
Thank you for reading this poem! 💕
In this world,
out there in open,
many things appear to be broken.

In this world, when it’s the darkest,
I find myself restless and breathless,
running back to the nest,
never safe, but where it’s best.

In this world, if ever so bright,
let there be a ray of light,
a new life, a new sprout,
let it, oh please, be found.

A long-held dream
regrettably, it’s not all what it seems.

A promise made, a secret kept,
where silence is never to be seen again.

A reckless risk, a mighty wish,
blowing back and forth in a sweet breeze.

In this world, despair’s the ruler.
You’ll never hear of anything much crueler.

So here we are left,
There’s no one to blame,
nothing to tame,
it can’t be defeated,
it can’t be helped,
just another feature of a daily hell.

In this world, an old decree,
we’re all doomed to such degree,
beyond salvation,
without a nation.

In this world,
we are not who we are meant to be,
we die at the beginning,
we live at the end.

In this world,
the end’s the matter,
and no one cares about the means.

In this world, I cannot live.
For I’ve decided to end,
and I’ve refused to begin.
Hello, everyone.
I'm new around here and I'm already in love with this place.
Anyways, when I wrote this poem, it wasn’t out of clarity but out of weight.  I felt the world pressing in from every side, too broken, too loud, too indifferent. The lines came almost on their own, like breaths I had been holding for too long. Some of them are shadows, some are sparks, but all of them are pieces of what I couldn’t keep silent anymore. (kind of rhymes)

I can all try to express with honesty how I felt in that moment: restless. Writing this was my way of surviving the unspeakable, of giving shape to the silence. If these words sound dark, it’s because sometimes the truth is dark, but even within that darkness, I believe a poem itself is proof of light.
F Elliott Aug 29

It was not the beast alone
that hollowed the soul,
but the silence
that made a chamber for it.

The silence of fathers
who looked away.
The silence of mothers
who smoothed the tablecloth
and spoke of other things.
The silence of friends
who chose comfort
over confrontation.

Every unspoken word
became a shroud.
Every careful pause
became a nail.
Every smile that denied
became another grave.

The beast feasted,
not only on wounds inflicted,
but on truths unspoken,
on the complicity
of quiet mouths.

And so silence
killed more surely than rage,
for rage at least
named what was broken,

but silence gave it a home.

The deadliest weapon
that lays in the hands
    of Death  itself
    is not the sword;

but the silence sharpened
     against the soul.



What destroys us most often is not what is done, but what is left unsaid. Families, friends, communities.. complicity thrives in silence. Every unspoken truth becomes a stone, every quiet denial a grave. This piece speaks to the deadliest accomplice of the beast: not hatred, but silence.

And yet, even within silence, the cry still trembles. It leaks through scars, through hidden eyes, through the fragile flame that refuses to die.
These words are for every soul who has lived inside that chamber, unseen but not alone.
Plumb gives voice to that cry.

What if the “cut” is not a blade at all, but truth itself--
naming the wound, naming the perpetrator,
breaking the silence that becomes a second trauma
worse than the first?
Sharp though it is, such a cut
can become the only one that heals--
the deepest relief of all...


"Cut"

I'm not a stranger
No I am yours
With crippled anger
And tears that still drip sore

A fragile flame aged
With misery
And when our eyes meet
I know you see

I may seem crazy
Or painfully shy
And these scars
wouldn't be so hidden
If you would just
look me in the eye

I feel alone here and cold here
Though I don't want to die
But the only anesthetic that
makes me feel anything kills inside

I do not want to be afraid
I do not want to die inside
  just to breathe in
I'm tired of feeling so numb

Relief exists,   I find it when

    I am cut

https://youtu.be/OJkqkWIpFAI?si=hMaAlmoUB_OnEoOG


Better the wound of truth than the grave of silence;

To those who have carried the weight of numbness,
Plumb’s voice  becomes
their own cry of solidarity

xoxo
Next page