Sunday Writing Prompt “Limbo”

Limbo

You might really be the one to break me.

Why should I be impelled to follow my heart
when she is so often mistaken?

Perhaps she is not my heart at all
but the heart of another equally misguided.

The one I carry now is surely an impostor.
She listens patiently as I reveal my dreams
and then dismantles them, indifferent to my cries.

My heart is more thread than flesh.
If ever I were to exhale she would unravel
and if I were less a coward I would let her.

If my heart were a sheet of paper
then I could be certain that she understood
because words make more sense than feelings.

Words are sharp and clean
like a scalpel, whatever they cut
opens without tearing.
Feelings tear.

I am tired of juggling my feelings.
My feelings have teeth
my feelings chew through my soul
like fruit and then spit out the seeds.

I don’t think I have much potential anyway.
I am not incurably old and already I want to die.
Well not die so much as sleep.
I have become dreadfully boring.

The me that exists in dreams feels real.
She knows what she wants precisely
and pursues it with a sense of wonder.
She is full of passion and pathos.

She is full and she knows it.
The me that greets each morning
is a tangle of nerves
and stale, overplayed anecdotes.
She is determined to hurt me.

I have forgotten how to be a person.
All day I wander around
opening and closing windows,
peeling off congeries of wallpaper,
screaming quietly into brown paper bags.

I am never quite sure what to do with myself
and I am always, always in the way.
It breaks my heart to see a sky with no stars in it,
to see a sky full of cobwebs.
A sky which accommodates nothing but shade.

How many planets must I shift
before I can roll down a hill head first?
I try to coax myself out of my shell
with jaunty aphorisms but I am,
heaven help me, the worst kind of cynic.

I believe everything
so long as everything does not include me.
When it comes to myself I am inconceivable.
I question every word, every thought, every action
until all propulsion ceases.

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