Where do we bury the words
we didn’t say, our silent
protests—do they die
with our bodies, encased
in the skull, still afraid to move
the hand, the jaw bone?
Regret is relentless–
thoughts become blurred,
bordering madness and crossing
into the places where nothing
connects, nothing fits,
everything rests only in disease.
We try to hard to reverse
time, spinning wheels
in a landscape of quicksand–
in a landscape of chasms
that open like cut veins
spilling every trace of life.
The sky has already fallen,
abandoned even by
the phantoms of what was left
undone—this place is beyond
haunting–subtract everything
you thought you knew.
Add it to the ending.
Some old paintings and a new poem for earthweal’s weekly challenge, shifting baselines.
K. 
Your last stanza gives me goosebumps. Definitely in uncharted territory.
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Thanks Jade. Sometimes you have to face the demons…
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Oh gosh. Thhat sent shivers down my spine. The images and the final stanza are hauunnting. The question about what happens to our unsaid words is so powerful. It is both haunting and chilling.
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Thanks Suzanne. Most of us don’t say or do enough when we witness wrong. I know I don’t.
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Yes, I’m guilty of that too!
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Subtract everything you thought you knew. That’s so apt. So well said.
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Thanks Sherry.
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This is quite profound K, and eerie too.
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Thanks Jude.
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My pleasure K
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I do love this poem – that opening question has been haunting me all day. All of it so thought provoking.
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Thanks Lindi. There is much around these days to haunt us.
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That last stanza is powerful….the power of poetry….abandoned, phantoms, undone, haunting, ending….it’s poetry when it sings!
JIM
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Thanks Jim. I”m glad it sings to you.
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Now that’s something I’ve never thought about before. Where do our regrets go once we are gone. Do they hang in the air like the vapor they’ve always been, waiting to be inhaled by someone else – moving forward with our past far behind them?
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Are we ever really gone? I haven’t figured that out yet, but I suspect we linger in more than regrets.
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Ego sure has one version of the tale — call it 1950s America — but the fragmentation & disolcation & disharmony under the surface dements the cultural brain. And here we are. That final stanza is a knockout punch. A place beyond haunting … Brendan
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And here we are. Time to draw a new map. Thanks Brendan.
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