shay's archive Poet Free verse

something i want to avoid

I will give her everything I have —
my pockets emptied into her lap,
the small change of evenings, the bright coins of mornings,
the slow, patient currency of apology.

I press my palms into the hollow of her days,
offer up the quiet debts I learned to carry:
kindness folded into the corners,
regrets stitched like moth-eaten hems.
She cannot see the ledger
she only sees the surrender
but every gift is two-faced, a mirror and a coin:
for her, yes, and also for the man who gave it away.

Let this be an apology in porcelain —
soft, breakable, polished by my wanting.
Let it be an ode to the self I am learning to spare:
a catalogue of small betrayals returned as grace,
a map of all the ways I tried to live better.

When I am gone — not sudden like thunder,
not loud like a slammed door —
let there be a room where someone stops and knows.
Let a chair remember the shape of my leaving;
let a cup be colder where my hand once warmed it.
I do not want to vanish like a coin dropped between floorboards,
nor to hang a sign that says: I am leaving now.
I want the leaving to be noticed the way a song lingers:
not announced in full, but not erased either.

Mourn me in the small instruments of your life —
in the way you fold my shirts, in the way you leave the light on,
in how you tell the story of a kindness I taught you.
Mourn me as if grief were a language we can practice,
soft and accurate, that lovingly names what was given.

So take these hands, these empty pockets, these apologies;
keep them like bread on your shelf.
They are for you, they are for me —
an offering that asks, if not to be kept, then to be known.

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