the innuendos of a lonely hearted man

ii. the innuendos of a lonely hearted man

estefaaano_writes

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half-words nestled in the margin

of thought and nothing.

a man who has learned to swallow

the sharp edges of what he means.

to let them cut him from the inside.

his coffee cools; abandoned altar.

ceramic mouth offering silence 

where warmth should live.

a mouth that never answers back.

 loneliness is not absence. 

it is a house with all its windows facing inward.

he drinks bourbon, neat.

nothing diluted.

what needs to be felt, must be felt cleanly.

without mercy.

some truths can’t be softened.

some men choose fire over comfort

because fire, at least,

is proof that they can still burn.

a man alone is not a grave.

he's a land stripped to bone,

waiting to be filled 

not with earth nor words, but hope.

streetlights; indifferent.

he walks beneath them, 

casting shadows that stretch and vanish.

his footsteps leave no mark.

his existence is a query posed to no one,

gauged solely by the void it leaves.

to be lonely is to understand that we are all

speaking into the abysses of our own making.

tonight the ceiling is a blank page.

where he writes all of his innuendos.

all the things he might've said,

if saying made a difference.

i am here. i am still here.

darkness vows nothing.

it never does.

but it listens.

for listening is the closest thing to mercy.

still, he keeps speaking,

in half-words. 

like no one, like him, like all of us.

loneliness dwells not in severed ties,

but in the presence of everything we never forged to speak.