Pinch me
this dream has turned with the tide of my lonely night.
Their screams feel like whispers
and the pressure of their unheard cries
swell within my chest.
I beg myself to speak up
and be a vessel between our worlds-
this place
and where every dream is swept into a sea of dark water.
A quiet child,
but rage simmers behind her.
A shadow is cast by what she dares not to speak.
She drifts through her world
choking on the veil between selves,
while truth is an ember
that burns into her night sky.
Pinpoint holes now mimic stars
and illuminate her binds to Earth,
mocking her with the light
born of silent rage.
Pinholes of light pierce through the walls of my container.
Another chance to see-
the light calls to me.
Illuminating my crumbling.
I close my eyes
until the pressure of my courage to feel gives birth to a galaxy of its own.
Then I can be with the stars and spin and dance with the bliss of
another death
here I am
I sing in the dark.
My memory finds you
in the background singsong of my heart,
along the rutted path of your cruel words.
It suspends me in a foreverness,
where my unworthiness pulses with the illusion of space and time
and I am propelled into endless loops of depair.
I suffocate within karmas endless folds of my unlived lives-
in each one I cannot forget what you said
and I am haunted by the ghosts of all these silenced daughters,
while every version of myself begs me to heal.
Within this space
between me
and the people that look like they don’t see me,
is where I freeze in the smallness of our differences.
Threads of familiarity dance around the illusion
that we have nothing in common.
Truth blows with the winds we share-
unseen but filling our lungs with connection.
Closing in on the space
between me
and the people that look like they don’t see me.
I was grown beneath the pressure
of a man’s gaze,
baited along this life
with their false promise of worthiness.
I fell to my knees,
in service to the hope
that I might be seen,
that I might be heard-
instead I am mocked for looking so small at their feet.
I now exist beneath the pressure
of a man’s gaze,
echoes of their disapproval
ring through the chasm of my soul,
proving my emptiness
again and again
until I submit.
And just like that, you were gone.
The plans I made are now just
an old face I cannot put my finger on.
I’ll grieve in silence,
since I need to be grateful
and it was never really about me after all.