Tag Archives: trapped

I Am In A Room

8 Feb

I Am In A Room

I sit in a room that is silent.

Yes, there are cringes and twinges of floorboards

and pipe songs and even the echo of someone upstairs,

but the cosmos is always ringing a little.

It is silent.

…

My mind makes its war in the room –

plastering memories along the molding of the floor

and hanging dead hopes from the high ceilings

and using the walls to buttress itself as it catapolts

its knives and leers and cocky little smiles,

knowing that I on the couch could have done better.

There is no noise in the room;

I am breaking.

…

The ground is a minefield.

I cannot move from this spot for fear I shall explode

one of its tricky little pitfalls,

and trip the explosion it’s loaded in my brain

with the fire of one toe placed wrongly.

It’s not a dance.

It’s not a limp.

I do not move.

I am silent.

…

I breathe.

The one defiance against death,

this slow, meaningless rise and fall

that is the only assertion that I still am

within this tired, still un-noise.

I make no sounds.

But I make change with the room.

A dollar-fifty oxygen,

a 23-year exhale.

Or something like that.

The math’s never really made sense

and I am too quiet to ask.

Maybe I am being shortchanged.

I really don’t know.

…

I am in a room.

And the room and I are silent.

The cosmos is ringing.

But this room has no door.

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Headaches

5 Aug

It’s too late a morning for what I’d planned,

hours of dream-thrashing that left me sweaty

what I wake up to, instead of the cool and metal sheen of dawn.

The shrunk-down woken-up figures of odd dreams and bad memories

wrestle round my neuron junctions, pulling at threads

and threatening connections that would sooner be left alone.

I re-heat the coffee and guzzle it down like magic,

hoping to thrust my mind through enough caffeination

to rid me of this rough-delivered headache

and release me, forgetting and free.

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Work-From-Home

18 Apr

Oh dear Poe and Dickinson, I don’t know how you did it.

Work-From-Home

I am going crazy
sitting inside this house.
They call it freelance
but I call it shut-in,
this endless typing of nonsense
onto a dead screen like it’s a friend
because it’s the only thing I’ve got
to talk to,
all day,
all the time.
I will tell you my stories,
dear static of electrons and gigabytes.
I will tell you all these things
inside my head,
poured endlessly
into the wasteland of a blank word document.
That’s all you are, after all –
a parched desert that we try to fill
with the thirst of our souls for someone else,
anyone else.
And so we write stories.
The only breathing
is the rustle of the blinds in a breeze
because I left the window open again,
a forgetful reminder that there’s a world outside.
But I can’t write out there.
Too much glare across the screen
and my fingers lost the quickness of pen
in favor of jabbing at keys in frustration.
Quick, spiteful precise stabs,
anything to flood my message across that empty line.
Lines and lines and lines,
meaningless lines we try to make say something
about our loneliness
but not about our loneliness,
about something else that would be greater
than just telling the world the story
of sitting for the slow-drip torture of seconds
as our life wastes away
down the drain,
a straight shot from the faucet
because all we have are the too-hard chairs
that become our companions
and remind us constantly of the discomfort we sit with.
There’s too much bitterness on my tongue
for me to keep drinking coffee.
We try to say something other
than the sounds of a silent house and road work outside,
because that’s not a good enough story
for a mind crazed by sitting endlessly on the inside,
calling it freelance
but dying from shut-in.

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