Unraveling
The stain remained
as my skin broke.
A reminder.
The “before this” phase
framed our visible unravelling.
Fibres frayed,
not taut now.
Lesson learned.
Your face knows it all.
I’m like your favourite sweater.
Fading
soft once,
protective,
worldly weathered,
always a shield in storms.
Warm when needed,
Cradled by knots.
Not any longer.
Safety blanket breached,
bleached by tears.
Never edging towards charity.
Not this one.
Not this time.
You skipped it,
just cut the cord.
It feels to me like a gradual unfolding of a relationship coming apart: two people slowly unraveling alongside each other, through both beauty and destruction. And I think the poem preserves that ambiguity, because a relationship is never entirely clear: we do not know whether everything has already ended, or whether the path still continues somewhere ahead.
This is such a brilliant marriage of image and poem. The words themselves seem to unravel with the sweater, until that final “just cut the cord” makes the scissors feel almost inevitable. Beautifully conceived.