What Grows Inside

Fun fact! With over 130 poems posted now, I don’t have a good system to keep track of what I’ve posted and what I have not, so I rely on the backend search function to see if I’ve posted something before. Apparently in 270 posts, including a handful of drafts that I’ll never complete, I have somehow never used the word “restlessness” on my blog before.

Anyway, in honor of the Day After Cheap Candy Day, have another sonnet about unrequited love.

What Grows Inside

Originally written March 3, 2013

The problem with my current restlessness
Is that I can’t escape from my own skin
Although I try to flee my emptiness
Yet will I carry all my hopes—so thin!—
The hope that you will (somehow) find me here
The hope that you will carry me away
And lift me from despond (so dark and drear!)
And let the light reveal a glorious day—!
But—no, I’ve often tread this path before,
And nothing, least of all myself, will change.
I simply wear a track in this same floor,
And never find locations new and strange.
I cannot scratch this itch—Lord knows I’ve tried—
I cannot cast away what grows inside.

Photo by Moritz Schumacher on Unsplash