Under a broken umbrella
I was not shaped by a mother,
but by a wet curb,
which said:
“Take him, Lord, he’s no one’s,
maybe it’s some kind of trick.”
I learned to comb my sadness
with a chipped comb,
pulling out memories
that pretended to be forgotten,
but howled like wolf pups
lost under no one’s sky.
We were raised in an air
that gripped us by the throat
whenever we wanted to breathe differently.
It is a prison without walls,
but it knows exactly
where you go,
what you dream,
and how much you fear the silence.
Our bond was never a fairy-tale,
it was a strand of barbed wire
we crossed barefoot,
saying: “at least we bleed together.”
The streets?
They gave birth to nothing.
We taught them to cry,
we gave them names,
we showed them how to walk
beside our hearts
without stepping on them.
The moon was not ours,
but the locked one crept up quietly,
put it in his pocket
like a secret too heavy
to give voice to.
The sky turned dark,
not completely,
just enough for us to feel
the collapse of a secret pact.
We, with empty hands,
learned to hold longing
like an old five cent coin,
which we deemed
worth more than any scrap.
The light was not stolen, but saved from forgetting,
a fragment of immortality
that the locked one took with him,
so we would not remain blind.
And in his eyes
something still flickers,
not only pain,
but a kind of broken desire
that still wants to be light,
even without the moon,
even in the deepest darkness.
Copyright ©
Florin Lacatus
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