pain

Of Wounds and Hauntings: A Poetry Collection By Naila Hess

Artwork by Kiran Riaz

Loss is that rusted blade
through thick bone,
it cut you off,
my ghost appendage,
and now you are a wound that festers.
I have no idea how to care for something
that is no longer there.
Not when love still sprays from me,
in complete denial of your absence.
I’m not really sure what to do
with these pockets of time
where you once nestled your hands.
How do I write a manual
for living through the loss of you
when you were cut off
while still holding the pen?

 

This is it, you know,
This moment.
You either embrace it or you reject it.
And if you run from it, what then?
Where do you go?
What do you do?
Where do you keep running to?
You think you’re running towards something,
Towards hope, towards life, towards love.
You’re not running towards anything
As much as you’re abandoning yourself.
And all that busyness you’re running to
Will never be enough to stave off all of that
Emptiness
That haunts you at night.
The emptiness that carved a hole so deep inside you
That you even forgot it was there
Until you closed your eyes and tried to sit still,
And almost fell in,
Lost and adrift for eternity.
No. You can’t run.
All that busyness will ever be good for
Is to provide even more abrupt contrast for how
Empty
Your life really is.
You cannot run.
At the end of the day, in your reticent moments
All of that emptiness will still be there
Looming, glowering, growing,
Larger than any life you could have ever built.

 

There are ghosts that reside in this body of mine,
Who come out to play after midnight,
They recite the stories that live in my mind,
Full, wailing echoes of their plight.

To live with this din I can’t shut off,
At times I’d rather be dead.
But then these ghosts will surely escape
Only to ravage another’s head.

 

of all the mortal sins
that have plagued the earth
since the birth of time,
perhaps there was never one
as great as never having had
the courage to love you.

 

Skin me open,
Leave me bare,
Naked,
Stripped,
Unspoiled,
Eyes, frantic,
Searching,
Wondering,
Heart, untethered,
Bleeding,
Bones exposed,
Raw,
Teeth gnashing,
Fingers gnarled,
Roots and spine,
Bent,
Twisted,
Deformed,
Maimed,
Unprotected,
Wounded,
Crippled,
Paralyzed,
Damaged,
Broken,
Rough —
Vulnerable.

 

Sometimes magic tastes like sorrow
Like the loss of all the things we thought we wanted
All the things we never knew to ask for

 

Where once I was open and raw
and oozing crimson,
I morphed into a vessel
sheathed in pain.
Everyday,
every minute,
every breath,
I nursed the hurt
as I drifted further and further
through breath and years
away from those old wounds.
One day, I crossed over.
There was no sign,
no ceremony, no announcement.
I had simply walked far enough away
from those old wounds
that all it took was one more step
to take me to the other side.
What I found both exhilarated
and terrified me.
For there was nothing prophetic,
nothing profound,
nothing remotely climactic.
It was exactly that —
Nothing.
A blank canvas,
filled with a vast expanse of
nothing at all —
and yet so much possibility all at once.

—

Original poems by Naila Hess

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