The Unfinished
Poetry by Crescent...
The tickets lay untouched in my drawer,
Curled asleep like autumn long gone...
We were meant to go together,
Remember?
But silence arrived sooner than we ever did.
The show you swore I would love,
Remains untouched. Unended,
Like time stilled beneath glass- Untarnished.
For to press play would be to unearth you,
Your laughter flickering in the dark,
Your shadow stitched in seams between lines and frames- Undivided.
The café at the pier still keeps a table by the window,
The tablecloth lies waiting; satin... Uncreased,
Like a sentence abandoned before its atonement.
And perhaps that is the cruelty of it:
Some doors, once rendered half open,
Turn into thresholds of memory.
To cross them alone would be to etch the remnants of your absence
On the parchment of my being- Unskinned.
So, I leave it as it was:
a promise... Unfulfilled.
a chapter in our lives- rudiment,
an inkling of what we could have been... Unfinished.
After reading this poem, I am reminded of the following:
We all have our time machines, don’t we? Those that take us back are memories… and those that carry us forward are dreams.
― H.G. Wells
The untouched tickets, the unplayed show, the waiting table by the window… each one suspended in time because finishing them alone would make the absence real in a different way. Some memories don’t simply revisit us, they preserve us in the moment before the loss fully lands.
This poem lives in the un‑touched spaces — tickets un‑torn, moments un‑lived, love un‑arrived.
Its power comes from how absence stays un‑spoken yet unbearably loud.
Every image feels un‑finished, every memory un‑stitched, every object un‑moving but heavy.
The language keeps circling what’s un‑done, un‑ended, un‑claimed — grief preserved instead of released.
There’s an un‑healed refusal to let time do its work.
The poem lies in what remains un‑crossed, the door half‑open, half‑haunting.
And in the end, it reminds me: unfinished business is an un‑welcome weight — a quiet hindrance to any new beginning.