FREE VERSE Poem: Bubble, by Myra Khwaja

Preface:
When I was seven, I ate soap to see how it tasted. Soap doesn’t taste good, but it was fun to
have bubbles come out of my mouth. Now, many years later, bubbles still escape me—
fragile, fleeting, but no longer playful.

———-

And if I had the words to tell you,
I promise that I would.
Words seem to fail me again and again,
phrases put together carefully,
only to pop and vanish like bubbles from my mouth,
never to be seen again.
Words, they always fail me,
so I stick to my own thoughts
like a criminal contained to the jail of screaming silence.

In my mind, the words flow unbroken,
but they cannot breathe this air,
cannot stand the weight of being heard.
So when my bubbles pop,
I pick up my pencil,
worn, taped up, and old
(perhaps from carrying the weight of what goes unsaid)
and taint the papers with my forsaken words,
and suddenly the pages are no longer pure white.

They carry my words so I don’t have to,
but only so many bubbles
can be placed on gentle paper,
and only so many can swell inside my head,
until something is
bound
to
break.