Tomb by Christina Knowles

Do you mean to kill me slowly?

Breath by breath

Smothering me with every withheld word

Every silent occasion

Your absence screams

What you won’t say

Do you want to break me,

Utterly destroy me?

Do you even realize

Your words unspoken

Choked down and swallowed

Suck the air from the world?

Suffocating, desperate for relief

Sliding, grasping at anything

To assuage the pain that unexpectedly leaps

Into my consciousness

Pain that lies dull and dormant

Until the stillness arrives

Do you want to empty me?

Hollow me

Till I blow away in the wind?

Or turn me to vacant stone?

My slow transformation

Unexplained

In the darkness, I will the coldness to take over

Till I’m the tomb and not the body

—Christina Knowles (2015)