Bridges


A secret kept even from ourselves:
how bridges are falling

between the imagined word
and the spoken one,

between what I say
and what you actually hear.

If you could slow
time down, perhaps you might

even hear them falling.
Bridges of years our hearts

have signed away to crumble,
collapse

down the middle, leaving
behind a gasp

of air between two banks, wide
with unspoken truths,

a thousand pleas for empathy.
New bridges are rising

into form, incompletion, then
falling away. Maybe it is

this moment of our lives,
when the bridges

left standing are the ones
we miss,

when the ones we did
not mean to build

we built
from betrayal, regret, guilt and loss.

from Unmarked Treasure

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