Dead Air
Every time I open my mouth, the room erupts.
Laughter; akin to the very moment a dam breaks with rushing water.
It’s a trick I learned young:
How to wrap my loneliness in shiny paper.
Stringing sadness upon the gutters cloaked as holiday tradition.
They call me hilarious.
They say I should have a podcast; a show.
They say I should be on stage.
They don’t see the quiet hours after, when the applause dies and I’m left with the silence.
There is no audience, no punchline to fill the hollow.
My best lines are camouflage:
Gaudy distractions I hang over the raw places, hoping no one ever thinks to look behind the curtain.
The one place where the laughter can't reach.
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El Bzaz
I write poetry in my spare time, usually when something clicks or catches my attention. Just whatever feels worth putting into words.
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Deeply personal memoir of masking pain through humor; grounded in lived experience.
Multiple interconnected ideas: performance, loneliness, camouflage, hollow applause, internal void.
Strongly negative; pervasive sadness, isolation, despair beneath surface cheerfulness.
Volatile bursts (erupts, dam breaks, rushing water) offset by quiet introspection.
Approximately 22 lines; falls in 16-30 range.
Rich metaphors: loneliness wrapped in paper, sadness strung as garland, laughter as dam break.
Pure lyric introspection; intimate first-person voice revealing inner emotional landscape directly.
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