Poetry & Graphic by Angela Bella Morte
I built a whole cathedral out of almost, out of maybe,
mistook the architecture for a covenant, not a debt,
knelt before a silence dressed in something close to prayer,
and called the waiting patience, though it never once was met.
I read the space between the words like scripture, like a sign,
I lit a hundred candles for a door that drew no line,
I dressed the little nothing up in velvet and in lace,
and told myself the ache I felt was longing, not disgrace.
Frustration is the word I keep returning to the most,
the way you'd curse a flickering wire instead of naming a ghost,
because a ghost at least had weight, at least had once been true,
and this was only weather that I mistook for a view.
And still some nights the frustration folds itself to grief,
and grief unravels into fury at how brief,
how easily it took to raise a temple out of smoke,
and how much longer now it takes to walk back from the joke.
I'm not undone by someone. I'm undone instead by this,
the version of myself who bartered silence for a kiss,
that never came, who took the ash and called it evidence
of fire, built a wall out of my own defense.
So here's the harder truth of it, the one I rarely say,
I don't grieve what was taken. I grieve what I gave away,
to something insubstantial, never asked to hold or keep,
and calling that a heartbreak let the wound cut way too deep.
I'll unbuild the altar slowly, one deliberate stone at a time,
and stop mistaking hunger for a kind of holy sign.
The frustration is the doorway. I can feel it hanging ajar.
One day I'll walk clean through it and not measure how far.
