subtext

silence settles into our corners

like cobwebs’ useless remnants

of spider’s snares abandoned into

the day’s conversational scraps we

wear to maintain some sense of warmth

together we tend our own hopes

twined toward some other sun

than the one each of us can see

with our clotted myopic eyes

upon waking into this complicit lie

resentment lies like the dead

barely buried beneath half-smiles

and small talk it waits to rise

untroubled to its cold rampages

through the house we built from guilt