#freeverse

The Last Night

I remember

waking up to birdsong.

Back then,

the sky belonged to wings.

Now,

just as my grandmother’s old book once warned,

iron birds

have taken their place.

The stories we feared as children

became the headlines we wake up to.

I’m tired

of counting sirens instead of sunsets.

I don’t want another tomorrow

filled with fear.

I want to smile again.

I want to stroke my cat

without wondering

what tomorrow will bring.

We grew older.

And somewhere along the way,

the world

Part 23

That’s not how

the Abyss opens.

Not at first.

At first

it feels

almost normal.

Conversations.

Plans.

Familiarity.

The illusion

of being seen

by someone

who already knows

how much blood

you’ve lost before.

That’s what made it

so easy

to miss

the change.

Because danger

is much harder

to recognize

when it arrives

through someone

your body

has already categorized

as safe.

And by the time

my instincts

started screaming

I was already

too far inside it.

That’s the thing

about traps.

If they looked

like traps

the whole time

far fewer people

would survive them.

By then

the damage

had already taught me

something dangerous:

freedom

and safety

are not synonyms.

You can escape

one cage

and still walk

directly

into another one

bleeding.

That’s how

the abyss began.

Not all at once.

Not with chains.

Not with screaming.

Not with some dramatic moment

where the music swells

and the audience realizes

the danger arrived.

No.

The Abyss

started

the same way

most catastrophic things do:

gradually.

A little isolation.

A little dependency.

A little confusion.

A little erosion

of reality

at a time.

That’s what

made it worse

than home

i opened my mouth: “what, you think the metaphor is stupid?”

for some reason it took you a few seconds to reply. “i think i just hear it all the time,” you said.

yeah, but it’s different when it’s with us, i wanted to tell you. i didn’t, and i never will. “okay,” i said. “what about this one? you’re the light to my cigarette.”

“now you’re just turning us into our vices.”

“you got any metaphors?”

“… not right now, no.”

so the cold winds shut the both of us up. it was always like this every weekday by the rooftop; staring at the sky, light pollution blaring into your eyes like the punishment of knowing. cold winds. freezing skin. burnt fingertips that smell like smoke. maybe forever.

and i figured there was nothing to lose, so i said something stupid. “you’re honestly the gasoline that burns my nose.”

your face looked too sincere for me to think about anything. i translated the downward curve of your lips into ‘do you really think that?’ but i don’t think i’d actually ever know.

“i’m sorry,” i said.

How I wish you were still here with me

Oh, children. Oh, children.

The words are beating at the back of my eyes like things with wings like hope like angels like a murder of crows and they want to come out but there's a disconnect between my eyes and my hands today and the words are stuck on the back of my tongue, halfway between them.

Tom Waits wants me to hold on and I think he's right but lately it seems so futile. So much shouting out into the void too much asking for a hand to reach back and actually provide the "hold on" Tom, baby. Words are nothing without actions.

Words are nothing without actions. You have to voice them or write them or action them in some way that makes more noise than thinking because not everyone is a noisy thinker and be glad for that because the world is already too full of useless noises and could you imagine if we could hear the unvoiced noises?