I write my sorrows upon the walls
with whatever red the night has left in me,
each word heavy as rust
peeled from the bones
of a heart left out in the rain.
This flat has become a mausoleum,
four walls keeping watch
over the wreckage of my name,
where every shadow knows my face
and every silence remembers
what I was too proud to say.
I write of loves gone rotten,
of promises left to die quietly,
of hands slipping from mine
when I still mistook staying
for something holy.
The red trails down the plaster
and I watch it without blinking,
watching yesterday
make its slow descent
towards a floor that expects nothing
and forgives even less.
Some names I press so deeply
they seem to sink beneath the brick.
Others need no writing at all.
They live in the stale smell of coffee,
in the fag smoke clinging to the curtains,
in the grey light crawling through the window,
in this tired body
pretending, rather badly,
that it still belongs here.
The walls are full of me.
Every word I swallowed.
Every pardon I never gave.
Every love I held too tightly
until tenderness turned bitter
and love became another name for ruin.
And the more I write,
the stranger the man becomes
behind my own eyes.
Perhaps pain is nothing grand.
Perhaps it is only this:
a story written into the skin of time,
a poem nobody asked for,
a page left open
long after the reader has gone,
because some wounds
grow old enough
to rhyme with eternity.
Morning eventually finds the windows.
The red is still there.
So am I.
Not because I expect saving.
Not because tomorrow owes me anything.
I remain simply because
even broken men
sometimes carry on breathing
after the world has stopped
feeling like a place worth living in.
So I stand before the wall,
surrounded by the ruins of my own handwriting,
a poet sentenced to reread
the things he wrote
when he was foolish enough to believe
that pain could be made beautiful.
The flat falls silent.
The walls keep everything.
And I,
like a bad habit the years
have never quite managed to break,
remain.
— enitnatsnoC oãoJ