Weeping Whispers

Two crestfallen typecasts collide

Image by Cottonbro Studio

In towns of torment,
repeated hurt hurled
through generations,
the symptoms point
to no solutions.

See those people
under the steeple,
down on their
desperation knees.
Do they pray
for now,
or after?

Do the boys in bathroom stalls
sniff lines in hope of happiness,
or to remove both
all together?

Do the girls in dangerous rooms,
stay from fear of inside rage
growing ever angrier,
or for fear of outside isolation?
Unknown no-woman’s land.

When the birds silent their songs,
and the cicadas silent their songs,
and the trees hold no leaves,
and the air holds no breath,
will our days be remembered?

When gods fall,
do they teach us impermanence,
a permanent certainty,
what we knew
all along?

When love leaves,
and logic leaves,
and ego finds this empty space,
who swallows who?

In shallow meaning
and deepened pain,
we see each others
and react with more.
How fickle and futile,
this future seems.

© H. R. Sinclair 2025

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Image by IMustBeDead via express permission.

Timing the Trains - J. Kayla

I couldn’t face what those 
three minutes meant— 
the space between 
your train and mine, 
how precisely you rationed time 
as if endings were equations.

Your eyes, once alive with silence 
I mistook for understanding, 
darted past me— a thief escaping his crime.

“Catch the next one,” I begged. 
(Yes, begged. I hear it still.) 
As if ten more minutes could erase what distance had already written.

Even that fit your plan: “Don’t make me ruin it — ” I trailed, 
“Then don’t,” you said, solving everything for yourself.

When you hugged me— 
finally, only after I asked—
it wasn’t warmth I felt, but the weight of compliance.

I pretended I wasn’t what I’d already become: a convenience to calculate, a schedule to revise.

The city lights blurred, and all their borrowed warmth spilled as cold mockery. I trembled, not from the night, but from the clarity:

This wasn’t the start of something new, but the end of something we never became.

This may be the last time I’d see you. Maybe you knew. I do now.

Between us sat suitcases of unsaid words, locks sealed tight, no claim tickets, no final retrieval.

Through calls stretched thinner 
than the miles between us, 
I collected truths my slower heart refused to carry— 
the last was already the last.

You engineered our end: 
a friendly epilogue, a deferred conversation, a soft departure.

But I chose the harder line. 
“Bye, mhmm…Talk later…” 
And I wonder if we ever will.

Now I stand, no longer timing trains, only the silence that follows. 
An empty track stretches ahead— 
its ending out of sight.

© J. Kayla 2025 - originally published in Short, Sweet, Valuable

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