Stitching Rhyme to Verse

This piece began in 1968, when I was 18 and stitching rhyme to verse in a bright room, thinking I was the only lonely one. I stepped back into that voice today and let her speak again.

Stitching Rhyme to Verse

Not the Only Lonely One

My 18 Year Old’s Vision

I thought I was the only one who felt this lonely,

until the quite cracked and something called my name.

I spent my hours stitching rhyme to verse,

cursing the pieces of myself I didn’t know how to hold.

But then a light slipped in

not a person, not a promise,

just a moment that said,

“You’re not invisible.”

When the morning finally rose above the warnings,

and the night’s confusion thinned like smoke,

I watched the tired kids drift through their own galaxies,

spent, weightless,

their dramas burned out,

their traumas echoing somewhere behind them.

The gassed and flaccid kids flying across the stars,

their psycho dramas spent,

their traumas drifting off like smoke.

The songs they never sang

still hanging on their scars,

waiting for someone to lift them back into breath.

And then along comes you

a presence, a question,

a mirror I wasn’t ready for.

Do you want to see the stains,

the dead remains of all the pains

I carried through the night before?

Or will your waking eyes

finally strip away the lies

and quiet that urgent cry

for sight no more?

Would you see it

for what it was

the remnants of a girl trying to understand herself

in a world that kept lying to her?

Or would your waking eyes

finally strip away the illusions,

refusing the old stories,

refusing the blindness,

refusing the cry for sight no more?

Written, created, edited by

my 18 year old self in 1968

and me at 76 in 2026.

copyright 1968