Sigh! It comes like a train — an express line through
my thoughts, no stops, no warnings. Oh how
DEPRESSION clips at my heels, familiar as shadow,
unwelcome as memory. Defeated — like sunlight
pressed to branches too burdened to bloom. My heart
hangs in moss — heavy, strangled in the green silence
of old grief.

Tears lean like leafless trees, bowed in all directions,
yet rooted in a place with no direction — a forest dying
quietly, where even the familiar trails feel like ghost
roads I no longer recognize.

I feel short of worth — like coins counted in silence,
never enough to buy the currency of being loved.
I glow in daylight, but dusk takes its due —
and now I dim with every breath.

I try to speak, but end up forcing books down my throat,
pages crammed with words I never learned to say.
But you’ll never see me cry in public — I’m an island
left off every map, burying bottle messages even
I won’t recover.

I have so much hopeful words for others, but I’m
a stack of unread stories to myself; a pen that dries
before I can name the ache.

And somewhere inside —I find a red box with hidden
compartments, each one meant to hold something sacred.
But they echo when I open them — soft, hollow
reminders that even my soul has forgotten how
to fill its space.

I am the lonely portrait— a relic of forgotten frames,
paused mid-stroke, as if the brush lost faith in its worth
My skin is painted by many words; learning how to be
tough, taking down note by hesitant note— while the music
always plays in a minor key, an echo with no crescendo,
a verse that never becomes a chorus.

I speak in shadows— duelling the lovely dark that dresses
itself as company. It moves like an earthquake beneath ribs,
quiet until it’s catastrophic, gentle until it crumbles;
paramount and omnipotent.

My tears are potent, but never that important – imported;
as they arrive like a contraband emotion, smuggled in through
brief touches, but never held long enough to feel like home.
No comfort in the snuggle, only a struggle for the struggle —
I carry a thousand reflections, yet none are my own. And still,
I try—stroke by trembling stroke— to repaint my worth without
a muse, without applause, just silence and canvas and longing.

I am the painter’s sad poem— unfinished, unframed; hanging
quietly in a gallery no one walks through anymore.