Notes About The Poem
This poem has been 25 years in the making. It’s shaped by the long road of my life — the ups, the downs, the static, the clarity, and all the strange weather in between. I wrote it to capture the way the mind can fracture and heal, how winter can settle inside a person, and how slowly the thaw arrives. I’m proud to be able to express myself this fluently at this stage of my life. This piece is part of that journey.
Static Snow
I write this alone on my bed,
nothing gentle left in the world,
the adults took the brightness away.
I scan through the stations,
static and sermons and nothing worth hearing.
Four nights without sleep,
waiting for an island in the stream of stars,
a song that could wrap around my ribs
and hold me through the grief.
Then a crackle, a buzz,
faint words rising through the warble,
telling me it loves me,
telling me to come back.
I had to go outside, take a smoke break,
walked to the mall just to breathe.
They played the same songs through the ceiling speakers,
and I looked up like an apostle
waiting for sunlight to choose me.
But no beam came,
only warm tears slipping down my face,
tessellating in the grooves of the tiles.
I had to leave.
I ran out the door into the parking lot,
where the sobs finally took me,
and the thought that I’d never see him again
knocked me to my knees.
They told me the songs weren’t his,
that no voice could travel through radio waves,
that I couldn’t feel him in the static.
But I knew what I felt,
love breaks through anything.
He was there in the beat,
in the pauses between notes,
dancing along the refrain like a ghost I trusted.
They gave me pills to quiet the visions,
and sodium’s slow crawl flattened me out.
They said my hope was false,
my belief misplaced,
my love untrue.
But I held on,
because time is a circle
and I believed it would bring me back to you.
I spent months in hospital wards,
learning the routines of a sectioned life,
sectioned time, sectioned cigarettes,
a sectioned mind trying to stay whole.
I kept my hope alive in secret,
my silence a refuge in a sea of talk therapy.
I rebuilt myself one passing snowstorm at a time;
each blizzard sent me spinning
between despair and reckless abandon,
the wild idea that I could be loved,
even from afar.
And when I felt alone,
I turned on the radio,
the songs spoke to me
when you could not.
But now you are real,
and now I am alive again.
So tell me,
can I trust the radio?
Is it alive too?
Can it feel me
feeling you?
I know I’m not the same anymore,
there is a reality after all,
and I walk in it, steady and awake.
This isn’t a dream,
not the afterlife after some god-forsaken ending.
I trust myself now,
I trust my design,
I trust you,
I trust the rhyme.
The song will play,
and I’ll dance with you
to the tune in this room,
alive
and finally mine.
But when the light dims and the wind turns cold,
and the snow falls like static from the towers,
will you crackle and vanish,
slip back into fantasy,
a flicker in the mind
of a woman once fragile,
standing on the edge of oblivion.
Tell me you’ll stay
when the world goes quiet.
Tell me this is real
even when the static rises.
I’m not the same anymore,
life is not a dream,
and this isn’t the afterglow
of some world-ending blow.
You’re not here yet,
not visible to my naked eye,
but I hold the line of hope again,
trusting that soon
you’ll step out of the dream
and into my reality.
And I’ll be ready,
awake,
alive,
and sure.
So let the flakes fall low,
let the wind whisper its sorrow.
Hold me in the light of tomorrow
and all will be right,
all will be hallowed.
Let the night grow quiet,
let the static turn to snow.
I’ll walk into the morning certain
that what’s real will stay,
and what once broke me
will never take me whole again.
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