FLICKER AND SIGH

 

Flicker and Sigh

The neighbor’s TV hums pale blue,

Its pulse dances on my ceiling’s edge.

Another sleepless night unfurls,

A canvas for the mind’s restless pledge.  

Outside, rain taps a scattered code,

Each drop a note in time’s vast score.

History brews its bitter draught,

A remedy for wounds that came before.  

Echoes clutter the air, half-formed,

Words like moths that flit and fade.

They buzz, relentless, in my skull,

A choir of things I never fully said.  

In memory’s haze, they twist, they lie,

Straying from the truth’s unyielding core.

Real is real, no matter the tale—

Words bend, but truth won’t be ignored.  

They shift their pitch, these fleeting lines,

Yet the story holds, unmoved, the same.

They flood my mind, then linger long,

Like rain that pools before the drain.  

Every screen a veil, a sleight of hand,

Obscuring what lies beyond the frame.

Oh, to glimpse, for one clear breath,

The world unscripted, free of name.  

Then—snap—the blue horizon shrinks,

Swallowed by a sudden, silent black.

Quiet storms in, a tidal hush,

Searching for rhythm to bring me back.  

I seek the beat in shadow’s pulse,

A trace of someone I might know.

Not the self I claimed or dreamed to be,

But a flicker caught in memory’s glow.  

Just fragments stitched, a life in scraps—

Words scratched out when the pen won’t flow.

A cough, a sigh, a halting start,

Marks of a voice that’s learning to grow.  

Now, perched on the porch of my own gaze,

I listen to the hum that won’t relent.

To the moths, the rain, the endless song,

I whisper: Let it rest, let it be spent.  

With this breath, I rewrite the past,

Unsay the words that clung too tight.

And in their place, a single sigh—