Unwritten Love, Unspoken Vices

By Noah Vale

The women I love I could never write
Poems about
The words would slip through my fingers,
Spilled ink drying before meaning could
Form.
But whiskey, painkillers, and cigarettes
I could lead forums about,
Speak in tongues of smoke and burn,
Turn my wounds into well-crafted sentences.

They listen when I talk about the bottle’s
Comfort,
The numbing lull of little white pills,
The slow suicide of smouldering tobacco.
But love?
Love makes my voice stammer,
My pen hesitate,
My thoughts tangle into knots too tight to
Undo.

They ask why I can’t write sonnets for their
Touch,

Why my lips can praise whiskey’s warmth
but struggle to whisper their names.
They throw tantrums, they shout, but how do I explain
Some things are too sacred for words,
Too real to be reduced to rhyme?

So I write about the things that don’t love
Me back,
The things that leave me hollow yet
Full of expression,
While the ones who matter slip through the spaces
Between the words I can’t seem to find.

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Noah Vale is a 20 year old poet from Serowe, Botswana that writes poetry as an act of
reflection and release, turning emotion into language and silence into story. Their work
carries echoes of longing, hope, and the search for meaning in ordinary life.