Underground
Written from inside the nervous system, where the body keeps its own record, even after the headlines move on.
Hear this poem as spoken word reflection
O keeper of alarms,
translator of thunder,
faithful archivist of every door that did not open
and every danger that did
I have spent years mistaking you for interruption.
Forgive me.
I did not know you were carrying a homeland.
speak.
I am the unfinished exhale.
The tightening of the jaw
clenching like a fist that forgot
it used to be a mouth,
heat collecting behind the eyes like weather
that hasn't decided where to land
arriving three news cycles
before your outrage does.
A stone cast into water
already burdened with its own geology.
Listen.
I am older than every coping mechanism
you have sharpened into blades.
Older than the masks.
I am the first drum.
The first inheritance.
And still
you speak of me as though I am the interruption.
I have been working since before yesterday's ruling.
Three hundred fifty-six thousand humans
folded into a treacherous decree from your highest court.
You think I went quiet. I did not go quiet.
I went underground, the way water does,
before it finds the next place to surface.
Contained, you’ve called it.
I call it keeping watch.
You call this shutting down. I call it triage.
I know. I felt you standing at the door of yourself,
hand on the frame,
deciding whether belonging was still allowed.
You keep appearing at my bedside
asking why I have stopped you.
Asking why you cannot move.
I keep asking why you think
stillness means absence.
Tell me
have you never watched a deer become landscape?
Have you never seen spring gathering itself
beneath the soil?
Mistaken preparation
for surrender?
I know what it looks like from the outside.
The unopened laptop.
The unanswered messages.
The book still resting where it was left.
But I assure you
She is not gone.
She is underground, too.
Seeds do this.
Grief does this.
Contained, you’ve called it.
I call it the only thing left standing.
Yesterday,
I mean
ten years ago,
I mean, tomorrow
I mean
everyday
through the ancient corridors
where history still returns barefoot,
before the mind assembled its arguments,
before language put on its respectable clothes,
you had already risen from your post.
I know. A body standing between floodwater and threshold.
You mistake the levee for the river,
restraint for emptiness, you mistake survival for silence.
You have spent years translating pain.
Trying to forgive the world into becoming safer
than it is.
Turning wounds into refrains for other people's grief
the way other women set the table
before they've eaten.
But there are some words
That no longer behave like language.
Springfield.
Father.
Home.
Belonging.
They enter as pressure systems.
Frequencies.
The body receives them first,
a tuning fork struck
somewhere beneath the ribs,
the way certain songs carry the dead
without ever once speaking their names.
You keep looking for the scream.
I keep pointing toward the tremor.
The vibration moves through everything.
So unclench me, then
not into unflinching vigilance
answering to wisdom
No,
no
into this instead:
the jaw, unlocked. The breath, all the way down.
Begin in the fingertips.
Cold there first. Always first.
Here.
Put your hand there.
No, lower.
Beneath that beautiful construction
of reasons and remedies and revelations.
Further in.
There.
Where names lose their spelling.
Where Springfield is not a city.
Where father is not missing.
Sing of the cathedral
with no chapel built for its own keeper…
Copyright 2026, The Unscripted Writer
