When I’m invisible,
I watch people go on
living all around,
unaware that I watch.
Dropping their guard,
they dance and flow and sing,
full streams of clear
water, bubbling.
Only as long
as I’m silent, apart,
not a part of their lives,
never entering their hearts.
For when I begin to interact with people,
and my cloak of invisibility falls away,
I am revealed; and all that was real in them departs.
People drift away and fall apart from me,
withered rose petals loosened on a winter wind.
How I long to catch their warm, soft scent again.
Copyright © 1990 Barbara W. Klaser
Written in my journal in 1990, from feelings of shyness and otherness. I started to edit this for the blog, but I’ve decided to just post the original because it captures who I was then and the feeling at the time. If I edit it now it will be another poem.
