Not Without My Muse Poem by Za7ra Sulaiman

Is it romantic?
or cruel?
how every elegy I write ends up burying me deeper?
I was never built for this wasteland of copycats,
cold-eyed predators behind their little glass prisons.
Always watching,
never understanding.

Take me to the lakes.
where poets went to die,
not to be remembered,
but to be left alone.
I don't belong here,
and neither do you.
You, with your ruined gentleness.
You, who carry silence like it's holy.
Lead me to the place your silence calls home
but no not without you—my muse.

Those Windermere peaks
they look like a place grief could finally exhale.
I'm going.
But not without you— my muse
not without the fire that still dares to burn in me.

What should have faded
has festered
a rot beneath my skin,
breathing in the pulse of every memory I tried to forget.
Pain comes in waves,
but some waves never return to sea.
I've come too far,
bled too much,
to let some hollow, name-dropping mouth
measure the worth of my ruin.

Take me to the lakes.
Let me drown in something beautiful.
Let the world forget I was ever here
except you.
Especially you.

I want auroras that blind.
I want prose that cuts so deeply it feels like home.
I want to feel something twist around my ankles
wisteria, roots, anything
because I haven't feel anything since you gone