Muhereza Rodgers Roger Poet Free verse

Tossing and Turning

Tossing and Turning

Night does not come gently anymore—
it arrives heavy, like a question I refuse to answer.
I lie between breaths and truth,
caught in the quiet war of what is felt
and what is only received.

You love me—
not in fragments, not in hesitation,
but in full, unguarded offering,
like open hands that never learned to close.
And I…
I stand there, holding everything,
feeling the weight of gold I never asked for,
afraid to drop it,
afraid to keep it.

There is a kindness in you
that makes my silence feel like cruelty.
A gentleness that turns my uncertainty
into something almost unforgivable.
Because how do you wound
what has only ever healed you?
How do you turn away
from a heart that never turned from you?

So I stay—
not out of love,
but out of fear dressed like loyalty.
Not out of longing,
but out of the trembling thought
that leaving you might break something
that cannot be mended.

And so I toss—
between honesty and hesitation,
between truth and the comfort of pretending.
I turn—
away from the mirror of your devotion,
away from the echo of a feeling
that refuses to grow inside me.

You deserve a fire,
and I am only a flicker
trying not to go out.
You deserve certainty,
and I am a doorway
that never fully opens.

Still, you remain—
loving me in ways I cannot return,
waiting in spaces I cannot fill.
And I, restless in borrowed warmth,
keep rearranging my conscience
like sheets that will not settle.

Morning always comes,
but it brings no answers—
only the same quiet ache,
the same unspoken truth:

that love, when not returned,
becomes a place
where both hearts slowly lose their way.

NB: Written for a friend to a friend

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