PATRICK TEN BRINK

Spoken Not Heard

My words are heavy today and don’t have wings
I release them, and hardly out of my mouth, they
tumble to the floor, not making the distance
to your ears, not finding their place
in your mind or heart.
When you are in the other room
I take a dustpan and brush,
collect the words, open the bin lid, then think
again, I fill a jar with the words that I
carry to the storeroom and
write on the label: spoken, not heard.

Patrick lives and works in Brussels, his day job dedicated to protecting the environment, his spare time to writing poetry, fiction and art reviews. His poetry has appeared in the US, Canada, and Germany, including B-Movie Cacti (The Berlin Literary Review), Iguana (Honeyguide Literary Magazine), Zen Garden, Kyoto (Dreamers Creative Writing 2018 Haiku competition), and Koyasan Cemetery (Maya’s Micros, The Closed Eye Open). His short stories have appeared in the US, Canada, UK, Belgium, Germany, and India. Urban Enigmas, the poetry chapbook, was published in the US by Dipity Press. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/Patrick_ten_Brink