The Silent Agora Poem by Widad Wivelle

They have built, in the ether of Snap,
a clandestine colonnade—
a phosphorescent forum where their laughter crackles
like auroras in midnight glass.
I know not the passwords, nor the spectral gate
through which their intimacies circulate,
but still—
I feel the tremor of their mirth
like clandestine thunder in a hollow sky.
They speak to me in corridors with velvet syllables,
their lips tinctured with courteous lies,
each glance a sugared ruse,
each smile a porcelain simulacrum.
They anoint me with the language of kindness,
yet their hands clutch the invisible chain
that bars me from their secret constellation.
And worse—
my heart's clandestine sovereign,
the one whose eyes I would decipher like scripture,
the one who holds galaxies in his quiet grin—
he knows.
He knows I wander outside their auroral amphitheater,
exiled like a phantom child,
knows, and does not speak,
knows, and leaves me
drowning in an unsaid cruelty
more venomous than open disdain.
There is a word—aposiopesis—
for silence sharper than speech,
and it coils around me now,
a serpent of withheld confession.
His silence gnaws me,
like frost upon an unlit lantern.
How exquisite, this hurt,
this gossamer betrayal:
to be seen
and still abandoned.
O secret cathedral of their chatter,
your stained-glass windows shatter my chest.
O clandestine vestibule of laughter,
your doors are locked against me.
I am the revenant outside their glow,
the orphan of the collective hearth,
the one erased yet still present,
a palimpsest no one reads.
And my pulse is a dirge,
an interminable threnody—
for the sweetness of belonging
that withers always just beyond my reach,
for the tender treachery
of a crush who keeps my exile
like a jewel hidden in his sleeve.
So I stand, spectral,
invisible among their gilded colloquy,
my breath fogging the glass of the world—
outside,
always outside,
with only these strange, unutterable words
to tell the ache of what it means
to be forgotten
while smiling mouths still remember my name.