A Most Unforgiving Silence

Today, I saw you,

and my heart, that treacherous organ,

roared like a storm at sea.

It thundered, it raged,

it begged to break free from its cage of civility

and find you,

to whisper the truth it’s been forced to bury:

I miss you.

The mind, ever so rational,

has shut its doors,

a bureaucrat of the soul, filing emotions under denied.

And yet the heart, damn it,

remains open for inspection.

Why do you torment me with silence,

then feign surprise at my fury?

Why pull me close,

only to push me into the cold abyss of your distance?

Why?

Because you’re human.

And humans are the cruelest poets of contradiction.

How can I mirror your frost

and still pretend I feel nothing?

How can I, in the quiet of my mind,

not ache to show you tenderness,

to remind you that I care?

I do care.

In dreams I’ve held you,

gentler than the morning’s first light,

but in waking hours, you torture me with absence.

You’ll never comprehend

the violence of that wanting,

the ungovernable depth of my love,

because you’ve refused to believe it exists.

You think love requires knowledge,

as though the heart were a scholar taking notes.

But love,

is not chosen, not reasoned, not earned.

It is.

A law of nature that defies repeal.

A surrender of all control.

A beautiful, brutal powerlessness.

So I beg you,

end this war of silence.

Release me, or return to me.

But for the love of all that’s left of my soul -

stop torturing me.