Your silence speaks to me
and tells me many things
about myself and you:
things which might be wrong
or false, or crazy figments
of my disturbed mind.
Yet, your silence is there
and I can't know for sure
how much it says or hides
of what you think of me
of how I stand with you,
of what is really happening
in my life, in your life,
together or apart.
It's like a vast deep void,
a gulf dividing us,
dividing me from you
and you from me since then.
And yet it's full of meanings,
and all of them hurt me.
I can hear in that void
the howling of a breeze,
screaming gusts of a gale,
the echo of spectral voices
awailing in the wind.
Your silence speaks to me:
it says that I can't reach you,
that I can't come near you,
that whatever I do,
you're out of bonds for me.
It says that I can have
only the fleeting shadow
that haunts my days and nights
but disappears and dissolves
if I just dare to stretch
my hand towards your hand.
It says that I can touch you
only in my wistful dreams,
that only in dream can I
hear that you are calling me,
hear a kind word from you.
But when I am awake
and waiting for that word,
you don't remember me,
don't call, don't think of me.
And I can't call your name
because you won't hear me;
even if I were drowning,
you wouldn’t answer my call,
my cry for help, for life...
Your silence 's like a wall,
a barrier, a thorny edge.
Each time I try to reach you
I only cut my hands,
I cut them to the bone,
and then I bleed for you.
Your silence says other things:
that I am not there at all
even when I'm with you.
Your eyes just look through me
and don't see where I am.
And walking beside you
is like walking alone.
I speak to you, you answer,
but you don't talk to me.
There is no space for me
in your thoughts, in your time,
in your life, in your heart.
I'm only a certain something
just thrown across your path;
a snag, a fleeting nuisance,
to dispose of and forget.
It says more cruel things:
Perhaps you want me punished
for having looked at you
and admired your beauty
and dreamt and hoped and wished
just to be liked by you.
Just to be liked a little,
a tiny little bit.
But you perhaps prefer
to see me pay for it.
What if you really enjoyed
my sadness and distress,
my anguish and my hell.
What if your cruel silence
were not silence at all
but only a cruel way
to hurt and torture me,
to put me on the rack
and slowly turn the screw.
Do you dislike me so?
Do you hate me that much?
I can't, I won't believe
you'd be so unkind to me.
But the answer might be
even worse that this.
I am not only rejected,
unchosen, thrown away;
not only spurned, found wanting,
dismissed out of hand.
I cannot be just that,
I must be less than that,
because to count me out
you should at least see me,
take notice, look at me.
But you are just ignoring me
as if I were not there,
and so I'm simply omitted,
cancelled and blotted out.
I feel I don't exist
I don't exist for you.
I'm not just unaccepted,
I don't exist at all.
I'm only an empty space.
A nothing... Less than that...
