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Joseph Specht Poem
What am I to do in the dream I have spun,
where I am both maker and made in one breath?
No step I may take is beyond what I’ve traced,
no voice in the dark is but echoes of mine.
If waking depends on the knowledge of chains,
then does my awareness unravel their weight?
Or is it unknowing that loosens my binds,
a fall into nothing, where none lays a claim?
Yet if I am both the deceiver and fooled,
then who is the voice that is calling my name?
Copyright © Joseph Specht | Year Posted 2025
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Joseph Specht Poem
They speak in a language you don’t realize you’re fluent in,
or maybe I am the one mistranslating—
pulling meaning from glances like thread from unraveling cloth,
sewing together something that was never there.
But what if it was?
What if I am hearing what you refuse to say,
if your eyes betray you in ways your lips never will?
If I see the hesitation, the fractures in your certainty—
the quiet knowing that you fear I might be right?
I wrestle with the weight of awareness
or the burden of assumption—
but which is the sickness?
To know what others deny,
or to be lost in a world of my own making?
And when I try to name it, to shape it,
to explain the way a stare becomes a sentence,
a shift in expression, an unspoken confession,
they tell me I am wrong.
They build their own truth,
reshape my mind into something that fits them better,
something easier to swallow.
I have always been this way.
Seen too much, or not enough.
Trapped between knowing and doubting,
wondering if my mind is a curse
or a blade sharpened too fine for comfort.
But no one has ever dared to find out.
It is easier to call me the villain,
to cast me out so they never have to try.
Yet all I have ever wanted—
was the effort.
Not for them to understand.
Not to say the right words, because none exist.
Just for someone to stand in the dark with me,
to reach without retreating,
to try,
even if they get it all wrong.
To see me.
And for once—
not look away.
Copyright © Joseph Specht | Year Posted 2025
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Joseph Specht Poem
I bled for you—
and now I fear I have run dry,
drained of love, of purpose, of self,
yet still, it was not enough.
My heart aches, but this wound is my own,
a betrayal of the self,
a blade I wielded against my own best interest.
I am trapped in the cycle,
repeating the same heartbreak,
chasing ghosts through the corridors of memory,
reaching for echoes of the feeling you gave me.
Am I broken? A wound that festers, never mending?
Or merely a speck in the wind,
a passenger of fate’s cruel indifference?
To this, I have no answer.
For as I age, the weight of knowing nothing grows heavier.
And yet, with clarity comes consequence
I now see why you left,
why your words cut clean to my bones.
I know why I could never be
what you needed.
So who is there to blame but myself?
And so I bleed,
wounds open, fever unbroken,
for to let go of this pain
is to sever the last thread of peace
I have ever known.
Copyright © Joseph Specht | Year Posted 2025
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Joseph Specht Poem
I became the voice of every silence that unmade me.
Copyright © Joseph Specht | Year Posted 2025
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