Untitled (a Poem)

The clock has ticked eight cycles of the seasons,
yet the calendar is a ghost, stuck on that one page.
For eight years, I have been a ship with no keel,
shuddering in the troughs of waves that never break,
rudderless, spinning in the gray, aimless latitude
where the compass needle just waltzes in circles,
unmoored from the gravity of a steady star.
I have worn shame like a coat with heavy mail,
rusted iron plates stitched directly into my skin,
weighing down the shoulders, clanking with every step,
a hollow music that announces my failure
long before I enter a room.
And doubt: doubt is the sand in the gears,
the persistent, corrosive grit that grinds the day down,
asking the phantom question, the cruel "what if,"
the interrogation of the past that yields no truth,
only the bruises of a thousand imagined exits.

Then there is the Monday ritual.
The night the world tries to resume, but I am hollowed out,
a cathedral where the bells have been melted down.
The middle girl- the space she left is not an absence,
it is a shape, a puncture wound in the air itself,
a silence so loud it vibrates in the floorboards.
I cannot sleep; the night is a long corridor of mirrors
where I see only the version of myself
that stayed behind still refusing to say goodbye.

I have traveled miles that would stitch the globe together,
exchanging horizons like currency,
unpacking suitcases in spaces and rooms that smell of antiseptic and distance.
I have stood on continents that were not my own,
teaching, reaching, vibrating with the effort to connect,
but I am a radio playing on a frequency no one monitors,
a stranger in the architecture of every city.

I thought home was a coordinate.
I thought it was a house with a door that locked against the dark.
But the suitcases are just shells I drag behind me,
and the miles are just road-dust on a coat that doesn't fit.
I am learning the geometry of a different kind of dwelling.

Home is not a place; it is the exhale after a long, jagged breath.
Home is the peace that comes when the shame starts to flake off like dead winter bark.
Home is the forgiveness I have been withholding from myself,
locking it in a vault while I starved in the hallway.

Eight years.
I am still here, unmade and messy,
a sculpture being chipped away by the slow, patient hammer of time.
I am learning that to become is not to arrive,
it is just the act of putting down the heavy gear,
resting my head, and finally, finally,
learning how to breathe again.

(dedicated to Nikolet Andreen Antionette Alexander-Hardy)

-Dr Delzetha E. Sinclair