Shards of Whiteness
I stand where silence is thicker than bread.
He,
not a man anymore,
but a bruise walking upright,
a shadow that still pays rent to the body.
Loneliness is not beside him.
It is the room itself,
the ceiling sweating plaster,
the window coughing dust.
It pushes through his skin
like cold water in a cracked bucket.
His heart still taps,
like a drunk knocking on the wrong door.
Each beat a protest,
yet the protest already sounds guilty.
To breathe is to sit in court,
to be tried by the wallpaper,
by the squeak of the chair,
by the dripping tap that counts the years.
Time here sharpens into nonsense:
a drip becomes an entire calendar,
a sigh shakes the floorboards.
Even the smallest rustle,
the mouse behind the wall,
falls upward into God’s deaf ear.
And still he remains:
a candle without fire,
burning invisibly,
like the taste of ash in your mouth
after a funeral feast.
I cannot step aside.
His abyss has been nailed into my ribs.
I carry the shame of impotence:
not for sins,
but for what cannot be done,
for the way care turns into theater,
a hand waving at shadows.
The walls pretend to hold him,
but walls are polite liars.
It is absence that chews him,
absence, slow, official,
with a face like an empty chair at the table.
I know this story.
It’s older than stories.
Adam shivering in the weeds
outside the garden fence.
Job scratching sores in the dirt
while the sky locks its jaw.
All exiles line up here,
every silence rehearses its lines in his throat.
So I do the only trick left to the living:
I stay.
Presence,
as a badly tuned prayer.
Presence,
as rebellion without slogans.
Witness,
as the last coin we have to spend.
For what remains
when hope folds its tent,
when meaning slinks off into the dark,
when words smash their heads
against the stone of despair?
Only this:
to squat beside the abyss,
knees stiff, hands useless,
to whisper without sound,
that even here,
where loneliness is stitched into the fabric of being,
life still stutters,
not entirely alone.
Copyright ©
Florin Lacatus
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