don't tell me to feel

because once I start

there is no stopping it.

don't say it's okay

for me to break in front of you.

even I tire of this person

but i am funny,

Don't you think?

laugh, please, and let me

disappear into the spaces

between the seconds

where your joy allows me

to remain unseen.

I will hide here forever

if just keep on laughing

at my jokes

when I need.

I would love to say that I am capable of breaking

gently, slowly, appropriately timed -

responding to the normal type

of things that hit hard,

but that would be a lie.

because really I am granite

and I do not contain webs of cracks

through which I weep and fill the gaps with love

no, instead

I am incapable of feeling much

of anything at all

until you drop the wrong thing

in just the right way

and then I fucking shatter

and nothing in the universe

can put me back right.

so sure, I break,

but in no small way

and I refuse to do so

until I have no choice.

to be seen is to be loved

and I have been invisible to you

for the better part of four months -

you do not see me.

so forgive me when i doubt the

insistence from your lips;

"i do love you,"

is not currently enough.

that's what she told me

as a child, following the chorus

of complaint, "that's not fair!"

one of children punished equally -

what one of us did, we all bore together.

it struck me as cruel, then.

but now I wonder if maybe

she was trying

to prepare us for the world -

a world where one person,

president or politician

can fuck it all up

and the rest of us

are left to face the consequence.

~i am my brother's keeper.~

I have wished for many things, in time. but as it turns out, wishes are not for the dead - and living makes a fool of every wish that forms into a thought.

so let's add it to the list, shall we? wishes, fears, dreams:

things disallowed in one realm

are the burdens to be carried by another.

i wonder if they ever get too heavy for Life, and if it ever mourns for missing that one thing which it can never have.

/remember./

the word lingers like a bell in my chest, reverberations thrumming through me, beating into me your insistence that, above all else, I will remember where I come from.

/but, why?/

i want to ask. the whine rises in my throat, my resistance to anything suggested by /you/... but no.

I swallow the question. It is not for the wind. Instead my answer sinks back into me and I choke down the bitter thought -

/How could I ever forget?/

i was awakened, last night, by a sound i could not place - a doubt, a sigh, a fear, a shadow in my mind that seeped through my dreaming and lingered in the dark when i stirred, lips dry with uncertainty and the confusion of a thought i could not place but which left bitter emptiness on my tongue, before sleep took me once again.

it is only later in the day - much, much later - that I suddenly remember that the silence spoke your name.