To Be Heard Is To Never Speak A Word
I was born with a voice,
A voice that ripped from my chest in my very first moments,
Between my gasps for the air that I had not yet tasted.
I was born with a certain curiosity,
A certain hunger
For the words that had not yet reached my eyes.
There is something bittersweet
About remembering the warm summer evenings
During which the sweat dripped into my eyes
And my tennis shoes turned the color green.
During the warm summer evenings
I would scream.
I was filled to the brim with love for the world
And I knew every god in every constellation
In every galaxy I had dared to dream up
Would hear my voice
And be pleased.
The fall came soon after
And the air tasted different.
I opened my mouth
And poured my words upon the table before me.
But the fall had brought forth the scavengers,
The monsters from under my bed.
They picked snatched up the words from my mouth
And made them into something new
It’s incredible how there are only twenty-six letters in our alphabet
Yet these twenty-six letters hold so much power
I feared the twisted words the scavengers had left
And I feared every god in every constellation
That I could conjure in my darkest nightmares.
I sat in silence.
I watched years race by in Technicolor
Never once parting my lips
Never once recreating some semblance of the voice
That ripped through my chest
At the very beginning.
When winter came, I sat stock still
And feared the snow because of the scavengers
Because of the monsters that had left my bed
And burrowed in my throat.
With the spring came the thaw
The realization
That I could still be heard.
It’s incredible that in the loudest moments of my life
I do not speak a single word.
I write
Because a pen is a sword
Fitted to my grasp
And sharpened to fight the scavengers,
To defeat my demons that snatched my words.
I write
Because I hate to talk
For my words to become twisted and turned against me.
Because life is not a book
And I never say the right thing,
But I know how to write it.
I write to be heard,
To scream into the silence of my life,
To fight the battles that I can’t fight out loud.
I was born with a voice,
A voice that rips from my fingertips
With the splendor of a thousand suns,
Without having to say a single thing.