ambiguous gestures
Location
i adore the feeling of a pencil
within my fist,
the yellow-painted wood
smooth against my skin,
drawing out my ideas
in loops and lines and spirals
of gray on white.
i treasure the feeling of a keyboard
beneath my fingertips,
the ridges on f and j
holding me in place
as my thoughts run out
through my hands
and trickle across the screen.
the written word
feels familiar to me.
the ideas and thoughts
appear in my mind,
plucked from the dictionary that resides,
dog-eared and heavily annotated,
within my head.
the words appear in front of me,
something insubstantial turned concrete.
the spoken word
seems foreign to me.
the ideas and thoughts
appear in my head
but are held back by my tongue
as it struggles to shape the words
that i can no longer find
in the worn pages of my dictionary.
but my hands know what it is
to make something imagined
become realized,
and they form the words in silence,
a display of ambiguous gestures
writing out the words
that my tongue cannot say.