Diner Poem

I’ve watched her closely—

But I've never seen her smile.

Well, no, not never.

Glimpses, accidental occurrences,

When she thought I couldn't see.

She’s just never smiled at me.

Her apron is stained

with the hours that will never end.

I’m watching her carry plates

to the undeserving

The way a soldier carries wounds—

Bravely, with no ceremony.

Never have I asked her name.

I didn’t want to know.

Whatever it is, it lives deep in her chest,

Right where it belongs—

Where only her heart knows how to find it.

The one thing more paralyzing

than her melancholy,

is her silence.

I’m not even sure I’d remember

the sound of her voice.

Have I heard it before?

maybe just a whisper.

Should I kneel beside her?

Press my hand to the cool tiles of her silence?

Only to tell her she doesn’t have to be

the pale angel of everyone’s hunger.

Maybe I'll say:

"Your sorrow is not invisible.

Your silence is not empty."

My desire is a misfit toy in this story.

Desire is cheap in places like this.

But tenderness—

It costs more than anyone’s tip can afford.

There's no tenderness to be found,

only polite mockery.

Their laughter, heavy. Their eyes, thieving.

To them, her beauty is only wallpaper.

She only hears the silence waiting for her.

She is vulnerable—

The way a cracked window is vulnerable.

I feel her fragility as if it were my own.

Her mask reminds me of my mask,

A kind of musical disguise

played on the bones of the world.

There’s a story sewn into her silence.

I’m afraid to ask what it is.

Still, she lingers inside me—

This girl who never smiles,

who is always one breath away

from vanishing, nameless,

into the receding shadow

of my mind……

Where I am forced the admission:

“I didn’t write this because it’s beautiful,

I wrote it because she is.”

…Now I wonder—

Would this make her smile?

© 2025 Thomas Arthur