How far the moon is from the sea,
a distant grasp for hands.
Reflected light is slippery
as it paints the silent sands.

A poor girl waits upon the shore
‘twixt fear and destiny.
Her family hopes for so much more
than rhyming poetry

Her gaze lights on the distant moon.
She mouths a prayer in haste.
She was told to find a suitor soon
else life would be a waste.

She does not know a single man
for whom she’d lose her name.
Yet being bound to paper and pen
is the union she would claim.

Her words are light and airy
but can be deep, as well.
Her subjects, bright and merry,
or dark as a witch’s spell.

Her poems are like children
tucked away in verse.
What on earth becomes of them
without their mum or nurse?

Never could she wear a ring 
to lead her life around, 
yet love forever makes her sing,
and language is its sound.

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Love asks that we risk
being the one who reaches,
being the one who names it,
being the one who needs.

What we rarely admit is this:

love does not only want our hearts,
it wants our hands.

It wants us to show up
as if the days matter,
as if a life can be built
from the honest repetition
of choosing.

Again.
Again.
Again.

Not forever as a promise,
but forever as a practice.

And yes,
it asks for the terrifying miracle:

to let someone touch
the parts of us
we’ve been calling “unlovable,”
and call them
home.

If I remember correctly, Carolyn’s prompt from a January 2026 post, “The Experiment,” was “What does love ask of us that we rarely admit?” I believe the response was posted on Carolyn’s Words in Bloom late January or early February 2026.

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I never lost my faith;
it just found a different address.

It packed its small suitcase of mornings,
folded the hymns like shirts
that no longer fit the weather,
and left as quietly as it first arrived,
no slamming of the door,
no thunder,
no dramatic liturgy of departure,
just the quiet click of a latch
in the back of my heart.

I stood for a while 
in the empty room 
listening for its footsteps
the way a house listens
after someone moves out:
the settling pipes,
the long breath of walls.

But faith was already elsewhere,
learning new streets,
making friends with different light.
It moved into a smaller building,
no stained glass,
no choir of certainty,
only a window opening 
to whatever it counted as real.

Now it lives above a corner store
that sells salt and sorrow,
where the cashier knows me by name
but never asks me for proof
of anything.

Sometimes faith returns here late,
smelling like rain and questions,
wearing a coat it bought secondhand
from some ordinary afternoon.

Sometimes it doesn’t speak at all,
just sits beside me
on the front steps of my mind
and we watch the world go by
without demanding either of us
make sense of it.

I used to think faith was a key
you could hang by the door,
brass and unquestioning,
always ready.

Turns out faith is more 
like a forwarding address,
a letter that keeps arriving
even after you’ve changed,
even after you’ve stopped believing
in the version of yourself
that needed a miracle
to feel loved.

I haven’t lost anything.
I’ve simply learned
my soul has more than one home,
and faith, wandering tenant that it is,
has finally found a place
where it can breathe, 
not louder,
not smaller,
just true.

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We speak as if something 
is still arriving, but the door 
has already closed on the sound 
of your name.

The room remembers you 
more precisely than I do,
how you leaned into corners,
how your silence gathered like light
on the backs of chairs.

I have misplaced the moment 
it ended—not lost, misplaced,
like a key set down in a life 
I no longer live.

There is no edge to point to.
No clean incision.

Only this:
the way everything continues
without permission.

Even now, while writing this
I find myself saving things for you:
a line I almost understood,
the last warmth of a cup
I did not finish.

As if the ending were a rumor
we could outwait.

But it has already passed through us,
quietly, taking the weight of every future 
tense with it.

What remains is not absence.
It is a shape that insists on being held,
and the strange, unearned knowledge
that we are holding it alone.

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Old George knew a thing or two and always said, as I recall, 
“The higher the wire, the harder the fall.” 

Time was, we could raise a little dream to distant heights,
and find some space above the lights where it could grow and act like a promise to those we left below.

Never once did we believe that those who bet on us would ever pull the net on us, or that they'd ever leave.

Today a lot of us fall and no one sees.

There are no nets: we fall invisibly.

We crash to whatever ground meets us and wait silently but no crowd greets us to lend a hand, to provide some aid, until it dawns on us, bruised and numb, there is no help, that help will never come.

And when we rise again, if we ever do, a bit more crushed, a bit more broken, we think the bruises will be invisible, too, and so the pain we end up living through remains unspoken;

"We came so close, we were at the brink"

That's a lot of us now — More than you think.

©️ Paul’s Substack, October 1, 2023

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I first posted this in 2024. I am posting it again on news of a new biopic that will probably promise more than it will deliver.

Words 
can drive 
nails 
through flesh,
opening wounds
not even gods can heal,
and there are some
with demons 
neither fortune 
nor fame can budge,
people with flaws 
too numerous 
to mention
but never 
too numerous 
to judge.

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Every word begs for its position,
like the silver in a cupboard,
knife next to knife,
a noise next to its echo.

The spoon sometimes falls away.
I stumble upon it under the table, 
covered with dust.
Still it knows its shape.

Grammar is nothing but a kind of mercy:
we develop structure
so the sentence won't drown.

A poem has its own punctuation:
commas of foam, an em dash against stone,
words whose meaning litters coastlines 
like the dark calligraphy of driftwood,
altering us continually into definition.

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The mind 
is a sea of thoughts 
rising as waves 
against the stones 
of reason,
breaking
retreating
molding 
the very coastline
they destroy.

In its depths
the mind speaks 
language that is
patient and 
untranslatable,
the way memory holds
what speech cannot.

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You pass through me
like wind through tall grass,
nothing kept,
but everything changed.

The air, momentarily observable,
is a recollection of your passage.

Standing where you passed
I bend toward nothingness,
in the silence of abandonment,
searching for someone 
I saw once
but lost with the wind.

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I never loved you.
I loved you completely.

It was nothing, 
a passing arrangement 
of weather in the body,
and it altered the climate 
of everything.

I could have left at any moment.
I have not left you still.

There was no promise.
I am still living inside it.

Your name is only a sound.
It rearranges the air when I think it.

We were never one thing.
We were indivisible.

I remember it clearly,
how it never happened that way.

Time has taken it from me.
It has only made it sharper.

I am finished with it.
It continues.

If I saw you now,
I would not know what to say.
I have been answering you
for years.

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I believe this is the first time this assembly of words has been recorded for posterity and I have endeavored to provide a faithful transcript of the discussion. As it was a dark night, I could only hear and not see those speaking, so I can only present what was spoken and not the identity of each speaker.

(Transcription follows)

1

Why is it we keep searching for lines in which we might live in poetry yet to be created by those who don't even know they will write us?

2

I am looking for a poetry of rain, a season of long nights with little hope for a moon and even less for morning.

3

I am looking for a poetry of stone, inscribed with hammer blows that meet its chisel only after the words are written.

4

I am looking for a poetry where words do not forget but exist to remind you not only of who you were but who you are, even when no one is watching, and who or what you might become if there is a future to be had.

5

I am looking for the kind of poetry that will gather up all its words, even those of us lost to time and memory, form us into ranks, and march us with the precision of a general with his troops across every desolate and empty white page it can find.

6

I am looking for a poetry that will leave graffiti to its wall.

7

I am looking for a poetry of sad songs that weep before they are sung, and an audience that refuses to applaud at the end but stands dumbstruck, eyes black and dry.

8

I am looking for a poetry that will unmask each conscience and demand it ask its questions openly.

9

I am looking for a poetry to gather all the lies told by priests and politicians, grind them into flour, mix it with milk and tears, and bake it into wafers to be served at their last supper.

10

I am looking for a poetry where I can be inexhaustibly intimate and reckless enough to make love bleed in the silence that lives in every heart.

11

I want to find a poetry that will die before death takes it, that will visit the land of the dead and find nobody home, and when death tries to peek through its window, this poetry will poke out its eyes.

12

I am looking for poetry that will allow friends who have died to be there at my birth and those who mourn for me to once again become the children I played games with.

13

I am looking for poetry that provides work if it’s wanted and when the men come, they should be strong. And when their women follow, they should be stronger. And better-looking.

14

I want the kind of poetry that lives in a house that hasn’t been built, in a town with no people, on an island surrounded by a lake with no fish but enough water to wade in on Sundays.

15

I want a poetry that will gorge itself on darkness and spit out a mouthful of light. I want to be one of the words in a line that creates such poetry, and I want this poetry to find the poet who will write it.

(Transcription ends)

Submitted to Readers as part on an ongoing project of collection and preservation.

All rights reserved.

© Paul Wittenberger, originally posted October 2024. Published in “An Assembly of Words,” December 21, 2024.

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I have spent a life
in the pursuit of vanishing,
not in disappearance, 
nothing so absolute, 
but a gradual thinning
at the edges of being,
a way of standing
just outside
what I am.

I learned early
how to lessen
the weight 
of my presence,
to speak 
without settling,
to remain 
without arriving.

It was not loss
I was after
but a kind of refinement,
as if what remained
might be more true
for having been reduced.

But nothing resolves this way.
The self does not dissolve,
it redistributes into habits,
into silences, into the shape
absence takes
when it is practiced.

Still, something persists,
not defiant, not even aware, 
only continuing
where I have tried
not to be.

I have spent a life
in the pursuit of vanishing
and found instead
a form of staying
that cannot be undone.

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I was told
I was made
in the image
of God.

Before any word about me
was spoken,
silence held me
like a seed
not yet aware
of its own tree.

I am both the given
and the choosing,
both the inherited
and the invented.

I am what happened to me
and what I did
with what happened.

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Some people live for beauty.
Some people live for death.
Some will dive into the truth
and never lose their breath.

Some will hide their secrets
between the false and true.
Some will find a heart to love
and each will break a few.

The past is like a looking glass 
to show us where we’ve been.
Today—a door through which 
we pass for tomorrow to begin.

And the future will prove
whether words we speak 
to make the ladies cry 
come from the heart 
or are nothing more 
than rehearsals for goodbye.

© Paul Wittenberger, Substack, January 30, 2024,

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My hands still recall
what the rest of me forgets—
bodies beneath the sheets,
the phantom of warmth,
the spot where your head
used to rest on the pillow.

My body is an archive
of the gestures written in it:
my palms on your breasts,
how you turned to face me
before our lips touched

I talk of the heart
but mean the pulse in my wrist.
I speak of you
but mean the silence
that fills every part of my body

Every part of me still aches
in the name of the whole.

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Language is a house 
we live in, and grammar, 
the housekeeper 
who posts the rules
on the door 
to each room we enter: 

This is how we say things here.

The housekeeper insists 
on proper sentences, 
but love speaks in fragments 
and unfinished lines.

Some rooms are locked 
for being too unruly, 
their language deemed 
improper.

And though the housekeeper 
sweeps the same dust daily,
the walls keep forgetting 
their shape.
                
The windows of the house 
look out on what we call trees
because that is what we have 
agreed to call them 
instead of spiders or dogs. 

Trees don’t mind at all, 
but they, themselves 
never use the word, 
even though an oak 
can tell itself apart
from a pine.

The windows also look out 
on what we call the horizon
toward which everything 
appears to sink 
as if it were a hole, 
but it’s not.

When we step outside the house 
we must carry the window with us, 
else we are apt to stumble 
over a dog or be bitten by the spider 
or fall into a hole in the horizon.

If such as that were to occur, 
eviction might be considered;
at the very least,
the housekeeper would make 
an entry in her ledger.

She would not be amused.

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We speak broken words,
with tongues that betray,
with syllables bruised
by their own inadequacy.

And still, we speak,
out of loneliness,
out of defiance,
out of the faint belief
that the world might return to us
something truer, more whole
than what we gave it.

Meaning is not the utterance.
Meaning is the widening around it.

Listen closely:
after all the voices,
after all the fragments,
after all the attempts
to say the unsayable,
it is the silence that remains
it is the silence 
that finally writes your name.

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At night, the house 
turns toward me
listening to how I breathe,
how my fingers sometimes curl
as if closing around
something absent,
how my lips move
without sound,
practicing, perhaps,
the one sentence
that could have changed 
everything
if only I had spoken it.

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I do not understand
the how and why of words.
They arrive unbidden,
yet familiar, 
like strangers who seem 
to know me.

I give them a place to rest, 
a moment of calm, 
a bed, a lamp.

By early morning, 
they have vanished
but the space they left 
glows subtly
as if someone 
had prayed there.

Creation does not rest 
in owning the materials.

Creation is like faith 
without evidence:
you step out 
where there is no ground
trusting sound 
will support your weight.

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On April 6, 2026, I posted the Note below that attempted an explanation of the difference between what the writer intends a poem to mean and the meaning or meanings found by the reader: 

I plant the meaning
and wait for its true shape—
it rises elsewhere,
called by another’s voice,
fruit I will not gather.

What I meant this note to convey was the idea that once a poem leaves my hands, it stops obeying whatever I intended it to mean, and its meanings can grow because what a reader finds is something I cannot control. Each reader brings their own ideas to a poem, ideas shaped by their own experiences and expectations. A reader does not simply receive a poem, they meet it. In that meeting, whatever meaning is originally intended may appear clearly, or it may be opaque, or it may step aside to let another meaning take its place—or it may end up meaning nothing at all. My intention can shape how the structure is built, the rhythm, the images, the pressure of the lines, but it doesn't dictate the experience of the reader who steps inside it once it's built.

The following poem grew out of that Note. I think it might do a better job to explain what I was trying to say than my earlier note.

Fruit I Will Never Taste

I planted a meaning
carefully,
pressed it into the dark
with both hands,
certain
of what would rise.

I watered it
with chosen words,
measured light,
a season of breath.

But what came up
was not mine alone.
It bent toward other weather,
answered to unfamiliar names,
opened in colors
I had not seen
when it was only a thought
in my palm.

Someone passing
called it something else,
and it was.

Someone else
did not see it at all.

Still, the meaning grows,
untroubled by me now,
rooted in gardens
I cannot see,
bearing fruit
I will never taste.

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