Shut Up Poem by Indigo Hawkins

Your demand for silence is the only substitute for music
permitted on the shore of this slammed door—
a sovereignty which habitually slaughters trees.

Tides can be fed but never appeased—
honest but fickle forever: constant only
in their capacity to manipulate sand into feeling small.

Even now, after they have brought me to my knees,
I want to trust tides as I trust time, a bystander
to the ruins rotting on this beach. Time touches

ruins gently, as if they were newborns still gaining
the strength to smile, but as this water vacuum rumbles
the sounds of home, I know it would draw me in only to spit

me out. So I know what I’m risking when I ask you to wash
over me, to open up and crash on my head. I’m trying to understand
why giving is not enough, why when I offer you everything,

you want more to throw back at my feet.
Boundaries are immature but appealing: brittle
longings for peace, or your delusions of quiet

seclusion. Talking to the ocean is like talking
to a child. If I can’t reach you, how can I trust you?
Whether you lash out or not, I’m going to feel lost

without acknowledgement. You’re beautiful and I
love you, so why am I suddenly so repulsed?
You think you can mold everything to your liking,

pounding shells until they crack, break open again
and again until they slice open skin and then are
crushed too much to be perfect, smooth as you intended.

Now a bystander is injured and you can’t handle it,
so you retreat without admitting defeat, dumping salt
to aggravate the wound, leaving time uneasily spooned

in the sand with a brand of anguish like brow-beating
with a broom or uncontrollable cartwheels whooshing
whooping cough. As a chipper stripper of certainties,

you comprehend no self excluding your own. Exhuding
love, you repetitively destroy a world I enjoy (the heart
drawn on your shore, the open door, you fill in to erase) .