Poems About Life

My jar of dark

do you ever hear someone say something and it just sticks with you?

Does that one meaningless sentence wake you up to what you're doing?

without realizing I'd gathered a dark cloud over my head and in my soul

without realizing I was throwing dark shards of that cloud into the hearts of others.

I woke up in a jar filled with dark, and so I screamed and I cried until my soul was empty.

I looked out of the jar and saw my body, strung up with strings.

I looked at myself and saw I was just a spirit, cut loose from the flesh that gives me life

I looked at myself in the reflection of the glass and saw black running from my eyes to my chin.

Tear stains so deep they could be scars, forged over a long hard year without my thinking

I looked at the flesh that is me and saw everyone talking to it, pleading with it

"look at yourself! you have so much life ahead of you and in you! aren't you happy?"

I screamed at them all "I'm in here! I can't see anything! I can't feel anything except the pain! help me!"

But no one can listen to a ghost because they have no voice left

so I sat down in the dust and my tears and wondered at my loss of a life

I sat and wondered why I couldn't say the right things, why I had wasted what little breath I had on such meaningless words 

so I sat mourning the happiness I'd lost without realizing and got drunk on the familiar taste of salt and sadness

I knew there was no way to get my body back. No way to scrounge up some happiness to pull me back into my life

maybe drugs could numb the pain I've gotten used to

maybe a new start could remind me of happiness

maybe I forgot how to be happy long ago except for tiny pinpricks of time

light through the holes in my jar of shadows. Not enough to remind me of daylight, just enough to remind me I'd forgotten what it's like