7. Exhibit
Exhibit I: Object, Suspended
Polished to function.
Hung for effect.
You caught nothing
only divided
what tried to reach you.
I watched the room move because of you.
Watched light fracture,
convincing everyone
there was joy here.
No origin.
Just orbit.
A centre that refused to speak.
I learned to time my questions
to your turning.
To smile
at whatever version of me
your angles permitted.
You were never still.
Stillness would have told the truth.
And when I stepped back,
when the spinning didn’t follow
I saw it:
you weren’t reflecting me.
You were avoiding
your own shadow.
Exhibit II: Exit Wound
There was no collapse.
Just a room
returning to itself.
Music stilled.
Glass cooled.
The ceiling, unburdened.
You didn’t fall.
You were unhooked
quietly,
by something unseen.
I stood in the vacancy you’d once animated,
and realised:
you never moved toward me.
Only around.
Even your leaving was mechanical.
No grief.
No gravity.
Only the hush
of machinery shut down
mid-spin.
Exhibit III: After light
The silence stayed longer
than the sound ever did.
It pressed into corners,
revealing what the glare concealed:
cracks in the floor
dust on the edges
my own shape,
fully intact.
Nothing shattered.
Not even me.
There was no need to reclaim anything.
It had never truly left.
Just dimmed beneath the choreography.
I didn’t speak.
Didn’t explain.
I simply stood,
and let my outline settle
in light that no longer moved.
Not brighter.
Not better.
Just mine.
Exhibit IV: In Absence, A Mirror
I was so busy watching you turn
that I didn’t notice
how still I’d become.
Call it devotion,
but it was something quieter:
the habit of disappearing
gracefully.
I learned to be dull around bright things.
To blink when the light bent wrong.
To stand still enough
to be mistaken for belonging.
You fractured
but I frayed.
And now,
with the disco ball gone,
the ceiling bare,
I can hear it:
What I thought was collapse
was just return.
There is light in the silence.
And for the first time,
it’s facing inward.
Brock Cooley is a Sydney-based poet who writes because he has to. His poems come from the fractures, heartbreak, chronic pain, and the constant work of trying to hold himself together when life feels like it’s breaking him apart. They are confessions, prayers, and sometimes curses. He writes to make sense of betrayal, to survive nights of grief, and to name the loneliness that lingers even in crowded rooms. If there is any hope in his work, it comes from the act of writing itself, the way words let him touch the pain and still imagine that something can grow out of it.