Toxic Comfort
Toxic Comfort
You stay there not because love still burns within the hearth gone cold,
but because your laziness is a lead blanket on a wound grown old,
you wrap yourself in ashes of a fire that no longer knows of heat,
and you call home the ruin that steals you slowly, quiet, and discreet.
The clock inside your house has hands entangled like a crooked claw,
the hours spin in emptiness, each minute the same evening's flaw,
the rusted mechanism of a life in two now ticks from pity's will,
and you call your fear devotion, your humble cowardice standing still.
Toxic comfort is a swamp of water warm and green and slow,
you sink into it smiling just because it's all you've come to know,
better an old familiar ache like worn-out slippers by the door,
than the cold wind of freedom pressing hard against your face once more.
You tell yourself tomorrow, maybe tomorrow you'll rebuild from naught,
but zero is the mountain that your sloth regards as frost, distraught,
you grow a long deep winter in your chest to never dig foundations,
and you bury in dead calendars all your great emancipations.
To remain where nothing grows anymore is still a kind of death,
only it's the comfortable one, with pillows, books of hollow breath,
cowardice is not always trembling — sometimes it's an armchair, soft and deep,
in which you rock for years on end all the dreams you meant to keep.
Rise up from the lukewarm swamp, tear off the blanket made of lead,
better fresh shards beneath your soles than crooked gold grown old and dead,
zero's not an abyss, but the blank page waiting to be turned,
and courage is just fear that slowly, step by step, has climbed and learned.
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