Can You Film My Soul?

If someone says, I want to film her.
Why?
She looks pretty. She looks artistic.

I’ll answer: not necessarily.
Don’t frame the skin.
Don’t light the surface raw.
I am a snake shedding faces.
Can you try?
Just once
try?

Can you film my soul?
Not my smile,
not the angle of my jaw,
but the tremor in my breath
when the moon dissolves in rainwater.

Catch it in my eyes,
the dry leaves of last winter were my lives.
Lives?
I lived too many
inside myself.

Look close ;
you’ll see it in the transparent veins
inside the wings of my soul.

Film the way I look at the wind after the shower,
how nostalgia ripples through petrichor.

Darling… listen.
You can’t.
Wind isn’t visible,
not even on your silver halide crystals.

And when that wind
couldn’t pierce the bubble I lived in,
I lived too far away.

Follow me into corridors
where my laughter echoes without light.
Catch my eyes widen
at the scent of old books.
See my fingers twitch
before touching something fragile.

Frame the seconds I almost cry
but swallow it whole
because the street is crowded.

Film the black claw at my throat
when I cannot be the mannequin they want.
Film the smile
painted with the gore of hypocrisy
as I greet them anyway.

Tilt the lens toward my silences,
quiet archives
of what I could never say.

Dipped into gelatin,
can you shine light
on the negatives of my cuts?

Don’t cut the stammers.
Don’t edit the stillness.
Let the shot linger on my pauses,
like a camera that refuses to look away.

Can you let the camera film me?
Can you stop deciding for it,
and let the frame breathe me in?

If you can film my soul,
you’ll find it isn’t a story,
it’s an invisible agony,
passed only from soul to soul.

Just a flickering reel
of someone
trying
to be seen.