BB Grey–musings

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“We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life; but the tragedy is when someone else holds the key to who we are and turns it in the wrong lock.”
— Tennessee Williams (paraphrased and adapted from his works on identity and perception)

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I was her effigy,
strung up and hollowed out,
a frayed banner of defiance,
flapping in the wind of specters—
the shadowed men who trespassed time
and left their stains before me.

She wasn’t wrong—
except I wasn’t him.
Yes, there were traces,
a gesture here, a fault there,
but squint long enough at a cracked mirror
and any face blurs into another.
She hungered to see him,
to resurrect his silhouette
in the marrow of my bones.

Still, I reached for her.
In those fragile, fleeting lulls,
cradled in the quiet of her arms,
I touched something my hands—
calloused, clumsy—could never sculpt:
a contour unmistakably hers,
soft as a sigh,
yet slipping like smoke
when dawn’s light stormed the room.

Hung,
scorched,
shredded for the crowd to gawk—
please, just look.
It’s only me,
unmasked, unmade.

I was never him.
I never learned the shape
of his shadow to wear it right.
But I’ll dangle here,
charred and motionless,
until the embers settle,
until the ash whispers back
that what remains—
this fragile dust—
bears no echo of her phantom.

Lay me down,
my soul to cradle, to keep.
And if I stir from this pyre,
my soul—
oh, please,
take it whole.

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