Is shyness

Loathed trait or dying affection?

Sister to anxiety or lost gentleness?

I find the urge to blot out when like viola, it scrapes gentle against my leather

When the world longs to remind me it is a deficit

When friends whisper shyly, I understand in myriad unfurling and smile

Part of a demure club belonging to noone, absent of plastic nicety

Roads blurred with eternal night, snaking into grey mountain side

Life would have been easier no doubt …

But like anything we have, it can be in the way we perceive

A taint or flaw

Gentle nature sans insensitivity or …

In the grocery store raising his shrill nasal voice What?

Judgement pinning me to papered walls, the father berates his son

You are shy? His six year old cowers, I want to unshyly run over and close his yellow mouth

Humiliating his child before he can decide for himself

Not the personality defect he presumes it to be

Rather become his son than he, with his blistering Baptist soul rinsed in river water

Let his son grow reading runes and singing with night swallows — leave him be

I’m shy when someone asks me to meet them promptly at ten

I itch behind my knees and sweat on silk, my underwear too tight

If I could wear a deer mask and tail i think I’d cope better

We climb trees on our first date because my mouth is full of brambles

You tell me I’m not shy in bed or the bath and I say of course not, it’s dark and warm

The wolves run beneath my fingertips as we undress and you remark

How uninhibited I am when I dance and how silent when we sit at tall tables with company

I may not be Christian but the lights winking make me cheerful every year

I adore the shy girl who chews her fingers and presses like a deer against trees

The silence when snow falls and we don’t need to talk, except in holding your hand beneath wool

I want to tell you how scared I am, but also how brave

But it sounds like an indie film plot; to live once more, half shy, half longing

Half moon imprint of liquid sugar on my old quietening heart

Like the glass of absinthe leaves its intoxicated circle of green eyed sugar all aglow

Silence has its own gentle good allure, its own power

Like roads blurred with eternal night, go nowhere, yet go everywhere.