Holly-Marie Winterburn Poet Free verse

The weight of quiet

The dark doesn’t rush me.
It waits.
Like a room that knows
I won’t leave soon.

I sit with my back to the wall,
counting the cracks,
learning their shapes,
pretending they don’t spell my name.
Silence presses in —
not loud,
just close.

Pain settles where comfort should be,
a dull, familiar ache.
It doesn’t shout; it repeats,
tapping once, then twice,
until my thoughts lose their beat.

I am alone in crowded spaces,
lost where I should belong.
Everyone speaks in straight lines
while my mind bends wrong.

I keep secrets folded in my chest,
creased from being held too long.
Some truths rot when they’re hidden,
some grow teeth when they’re gone.

The walls remember everything
I try to forget.
They echo old moments back at me,
collecting my debt.

I breathe —
the dark breathes back.
A quiet rhyme,
a mirrored fact.

There are nights when I feel
too heavy to disappear,
too broken to stay,
caught between then and here.

If I could name this feeling,
I think it would be trapped —
not tied, not bound,
just unable to step back.

So I sit with the quiet,
let it settle, let it stay.
Because leaving feels impossible,
and surviving feels the same way.

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