Poem

A cool, dull roar echoes in my head
Drowning out any other thoughts and feelings.
When I dare to feel
My heart doesn’t let me.

My heart doesn’t have an outlet
Or an inlet.
When it beats, when it pulses
It echoes in my head
But in life
That resonance has nowhere to go.

So when I feel, it is all I feel
But it doesn’t change anything.
When I feel
It overwhelms me.
And I have to learn to bundle it back up
Lock it away.

So I have learned to instinctively shut off every feeling at the source.
Tightening the valve

And when I want to play
When I want to capture a feeling
When I want to remember what it felt like
To love
To lust
To desire
My heart clamps down on it and warns me.

It knows better.