The Waiting Room

Most of my art oozes from old wounds long scabbed over, but this is the relentless present - no romantic haze, just bare-knuckled truth. Hunger’s a vulture, picking my gut clean. Cold’s a squatter in my bones, pitching a tent in the marrow. Time’s a sadistic jester - the clock frozen mid-tick, grinning at me with its wordless accusation. When life crumbles to ash, I burrow into myself - not from spite, but because I can’t stomach being someone’s dead weight. My friends have weathered my scratched record for years; I won’t spin that broken tune again. So I swallow the silence. Days melt into nights, edges blurred to nothing. Waiting’s become my pulse now, a rhythm so ingrained it’s second nature. The swagger I once wore? Ground to dust beneath the slow erosion of survival. In a rare stab at hope, I reached out to a collector I once admired. I didn’t ask for a sale, didn’t ask for a kidney - just a single retweet. A cheap spark that might light the fuse. His reply? An icy sneer: “Get a job.” He didn’t see the years I scraped by on under-the-table gigs for $2 an hour. Didn’t know my expired passport and visa nailed that door shut. Didn’t sense the desperation in my last lunge from the pit. To him, I was just another whiny artist groveling for crumbs - pissed on and kicked aside. Hunger’s no poet’s muse. It’s a dull blade hacking my bones to splinters. It’s lying still, hoarding every calorie like stolen breath, because moving’s a fire you can’t feed. One meal a day fades to one every three, then two weeks of nothing but water and bitter thoughts. It dulls your edges. Slows your blood. You stop feeling human - turning from a living soul into a drifting shadow pacing frozen rooms. As fifty looms, my body howls with fatigue and warning. Through frost-crusted glass, I watch families laugh, glasses clinking over steaming plates - warmth I can’t touch. Not envy, but the jagged awareness of the rift between their world and mine, a life flickering just out of reach. Yet I still create. It’s my last anchor - the one thread I can twist and tame. I weave my stories into surreal, jagged shards, praying someone tears the veil to see the bleeding heart beneath. Maybe then the tide will turn. Maybe everything will shatter and rise anew. But for now, I’m frozen here. Still waiting.