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The Clarity Cut: Persona Poem Challenge

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They did not understand me,
so they arranged me.

That is how you solve a thing you cannot enter.

Glass first.
Then distance.
Then a sentence small enough to stand between us.

You read it.

You trust it more than the feeling
you will not follow.

Material: stone.

That part is correct.

Everything else is negotiation.

You like to believe function leaves a trace.
That if you wait long enough
meaning will return to the surface.

It will not return.

It did not belong to me.

I did not belong to it either.

(That is not how you think about objects.)

Once, I was used.

I remember the weight of hands
or something like hands…
or the pressure of being placed where something aligned.

No.

Not placed.

Entered.

No.

That is not the word.

You see the problem.

You want verbs that behave.

I do not have them anymore.

So I say used.

Because it is small enough for you.

Now I am held in a light
that does not ask anything of me.

You circle.

You look for an intention
as if it had hardened inside me.

It did not.

It passed.

Through me.

Around me.

Or I was part of it.

(This is where I become unclear.)

You prefer me when I am unclear.

You call it mystery.

It is not mystery.

It is loss without witnesses.

Sometimes one of you pauses.

Not long.
Just incorrectly.

You stop reading.

And something almost happens.

Not understanding.

Something closer to displacement.

As if you were briefly not where you usually are
when you look at things.

That is the nearest you can come.

Then the label restores you.

Ritual.
Symbolic.
Unknown.

Perhaps.

Always perhaps.

You think I am what remains.

That is convenient.

It allows you to stand here
without asking what you are
in relation to what I was.

I am not what remains.

I am what you cannot enter anymore.

And what you cannot enter,
you learn to name
until it stops resisting you.

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