Starving

let us start here, with a cracked hourglass, 

where sand’s final grain gathers into a shape 

of a bruised child, 

left alone in a cold house.

You stand, you wait. 

the sun sets and you wait more, sour as lemons crushed 

into lukewarm tea.

Every darkened thought has a hand, 

holds you back by the collar--forgiveness-soft, god-tender--

whispering not yet, not yet... 

"you’re only as strong as your ability to stay quiet."

and here you are, mid-breath, carving scars from years 

into the canvas of a half-drawn face. Running your fingers over the white  

as if feeling for a pulse under stretched skin.

What will you call it? 

The work spills like milk tipped from a table--

white pools on wooden floors seeping into cracks, feeding the flies, 

sour-sweet, beautiful in its wrongness, rotting its way 

through you. You name it nothing; you’ll leave it to die 

unclaimed, another broken relic to the altar of “almost.” 

"--do you ever dream, Mother?"

you’re asking the empty chair,

the god you abandoned at 17,

when you couldn’t bend 

any longer to prayers written in your father’s handwriting. 

he said all you needed was faith--but you only grew to have 

faith in your own ruin, your hands too heavy for prayer 

but light enough for wine glasses, pills, and pens. 

you paint, but hate the brush--its soft betrayal, 

its need to dig out pain’s thinnest edge. You wonder if art 

is god’s greatest curse, or only a stain left behind 

by the need to survive.

“The artist must suffer”, they told you, 

but why? Whose mercy does your sorrow buy? 

You laugh bitterly. 

whoever said that has 

never tasted hunger--not like this. 

“you can’t eat poetry, can’t fill your belly on longing.” 

you ask yourself what remains after the striving, after 

each day slips its heel on the waxed floors of ambition. 

is there peace in the conclusion? Not really, only the waiting room 

where every artist sits--half-devoured by their longing, 

a chapel of discontent painted the color of dried blood. 

maybe my end is just a room empty of dreams, 

where each saint sleeps with hunger, 

where even desire has grown tired enough to die.