I stand, 
in the shadow of laughter, 
hidden among the corners, 
where the noise fades into a hum, 
where the lights burn too bright for my eyes. 

I am the one who watches, 
the one who doesn’t know how to enter, 
how to fold myself into this living dance, 
so, I linger— 
like a stranger caught between worlds, 
too far to reach, 
too close to disappear.

The walls speak their language, 
a chorus of familiar names, 
and I, 
with my foreign skin, 
my hands clenched tight 
around the words I never learned, 
am nothing but a flicker at the edge, 
a ripple unseen in the crowd. 

I am the intruder, 
the half-formed thought, 
the space between breaths— 
always at the threshold, 
never crossing over. 

I stand with the weight of not belonging, 
but also, with the secret thrill 
of being invisible, 
of seeing without being seen, 
of holding the room in my silence 
and knowing it doesn’t need me 
to fill its air. 

And still, 
I stand— a wallflower, 
uninvited, 
yet somehow, still here. 

 

 

 

 

Photo credits: Pinterest 

For dVerse Poetics where Dora invites us to use a type of margin as a springboard for our poems 🩷

Posted for Poetics: Diving into the Margins @dVerse Poets Pub