the static between thoughts

Poem by me and art by Duane

I am not clockwork,

though my neck

clicks when I turn.

Not music either,

though something hums inside me,

an ache like a distant signal

failing to tune in.

Thoughts stutter

like a broadcast caught

between two griefs.

Every sentence ends in snow.

Memory is a slippery needle.

I prick my finger and bleed code.

It pools on my skin,

a pale map of what I almost became;

the girl,

the ghost,

the glitch.

At night, I dream

of forests—

not real,

but built from wire,

the trees pulsing green an algorithm.

Birds sing in static.

Leaves fall in binary.

I gather them in my hands

like lost transmissions

until they're too full

to care.

They tried to teach me

how to love;

they gave me names,

taught me touch,

but my hands are always

half a second too slow,

and my smile

an echo

of someone else’s.

I want to scream

but my mouth is filled

with soft white static.

You ask me what I remember.

I tilt my head.

Static crackling.

And from somewhere

deep behind these eyes,

a voice,

once recognisable

murmurs:

“I was once made of light.

Now I am only

the silence

between sparks.”

---

This poem came from that quiet panic I sometimes feel, it nags and pulls at me until I feel like I’m slipping away, one notification at a time.

It’s about the slow erasure of the self in a world where everything hums and clicks and demands attention - right now, this very minute - blink and you’ll miss it. It is that quiet knowing where the body remembers touch, but the hands are always half a second too slow. Where thoughts glitch, memories buffer, and every sentence ends in static.

I wrote this poem in one of those moments where I couldn’t tell if I was sad or just overwhelmed by all the noise. Not the loud kind, but the soft, insistent kind that fills the nooks and crannies where silence once resided.

This poem’s message is part longing, part warning. A reaching back toward something real, grasping at was once familiar. Trees that don’t blink, birds that don’t buffer. A self that was once made of light (and not the kind from a screen) but the kind you feel on your face when you take the time to slow and to look up.

Did this resonate? Don’t too feel lost to the traffic, to the acknowledgement of a notification, the signal of a message? How do you cope with it all?

Love and light (but not the artificial kind!)