It's Still Life

10 of 27: Quillbone – The Poem – The Truth Told Too Late

10 of 27: Quillbone – the poem – The Truth Told Too Late

I. The Silence

Quillbone does not begin with the lie—
it begins with the space after,
where the truth waits

where words unsaid turn slowly
into I can’t,
into I won’t,
into it’s too late now.

You’ll know it by its weight:
not a sharp cut of deception,
but the dull ache of what if—
the way your teeth grind
the unsaid into powder,
swallowed like communion.

The dry mouth.
The way your voice
catches on someone else’s name.

II. The Confession

It smells like iron and dust,
like the inside of a locked box
where a letter yellows,
like the breath you exhale
into your phone
after the dial tone begins.

Quillbone is not the lie.
It’s the aftermath—
the way the truth,
when finally spoken,
doesn’t soar like a bird
but drags like an anchor,
rusted from years
at the bottom of your throat.

This is not repentance.
This is reckoning—
a pitched plate, thrown,
the slow unraveling
of a knot tied too tight
to ever loosen cleanly.

III. The Echo

Sometimes, in the hollow of night,
it flickers—
a vision of the face you should have spoken to,
the hands you should have held,
the ears that might have listened
if only you’d been braver,
if only you’d been sooner,
if only.

But the clock always ticks,
and the moment passes,
and the words settle
like sediment
in the riverbed of your ribs.

The heart learns to carry
what the mouth could not.
It is not lighter.
It is not easier.
But it is yours.

IV. The Unspoken

Quillbone does not fade.
It hardens—
like ink on an unsent love letter,
like a voicemail saved for the words in it,
like the I love you
that lives now
in the hollow
of a closed box.

There is no absolution.
No closure.
Only the quiet understanding
that some truths
are not for healing,
but for carrying.

The last word is always an accident:
a slip of the tongue,
a crack in the armour,
a whisper to an empty room.
No one hears.
No one answers.

V. Felreil’s Epilogue

He finds it in
the hush of abandoned churches,
in the way a pen hovers
over a page it will never mark,
in the pause before a name
is spoken aloud
for the first time
in years.

He doesn’t collect it.
He kneels beside it—
this altar of untimely revelations,
this shrine of too late and not enough—
and for the first time in centuries,
he hesitates.

Then he closes the book.
Not in judgment.
In witness.