Let me walk the spaces of my thoughts
And share these silences with you-
You care-
You are the one who holds
My voice between your heart-beats.
Where did you hide all the years
Across the crowded rooms
Of social inanities?
I never observed this look in your eyes
Which reads into my quiet,
Meanings I thought were hidden away.
Where did you learn this language
That gives word to my veil?
Why was your infinite tenderness stirred
By something unknown even to me?
I looked up when you entered my room,
Unfurnished, but for the memories
That lay in disarray.
My patchwork quilt of loving commitments
Was in a heap on the floor-
I sensed a disturbing ownership, unadmitted.
How did you know that in this pile
You’d find a person I misplaced?
Even I had forgotten her-
And you? Who never saw her?
Yet you knew she was there-
Unpeeling the masks grown into my being
Overlaid over the years,
Till I stood with a flayed soul,
Vulnerable and un-skinned.
I was afraid of me, this me-
She belonged to the wind and the desert,
To voices that spoke through trees,
She lived in the globules of rain
Hushing into river and sea;
She strung her music to her silence,
Defeating the voices of the choir…
I was sure I had bolted the door,
Barred it and nailed it shut-
I had no wish to see her,
She frightened my structured sanctities;
I had no answers to her questions,
No space for her spirit or her soul-
Which jostled for space with my duties
Recognised by sanitised laws.
Was the bolt open from inside?
Did you walk in through a warped door?
Did you find the key I threw away?
Was it you who came to me,
Or did I, imprisoned, seek you?
I stumbled upon some heart-beats,
Unheard before,
Unaware whose they could be:
Welded between us into an entity
With no name to them;
Free at last to be…