The Many Faces of Silence

NOTE TO SELF: FORGET ME NOT

Your ways of keeping silent
force me to lose
count and watch how close
I come to reaching outside
myself for words I know
as a script knows that
its language is never
actually real

make believe is wanting
to substitute—make believe
is making truth

so I look for a backpack I can’t
really carry and leave
it behind with not knowing
as a nightmare
closing my eyes every chance
I make to go to nightmares
stand in their midst

frightened

out of words out of
reason into silence
that's real and full and wiser

A TONGUE OF MY CHOOSING

There is no silence when you decide
to not speak to me. I still hear
language in whatever step

there’s a thought

I move your alphabet away
from my palate, tired of tasting
my blood on predator’s teeth. You
lick them clean mistaking absence
for silence and more.

There are voices in what I breathe
I look for a language
to sustain a meditation and my mouth
belongs to me again
So leave, or stay, or be—your silence
does not hold my tongue

MAY INTERRUPTIONS COME IN TIDES

A nap yields fantasies that must be
returned as soon as it is over. As if
it were a library and someone else
could have those fantasies and make
them different, make them theirs and
forget and not know that you were
the previous user that you still hold them
in intimacy

time for shedding your own skin

time for a few days of not having
to talk as a form of fitting in

and then something will happen
in the sky without the technicalities
of why it is always painted light
blue when I’ve seen the spectrum

one is always missing—it’s green

the color of leaves

so she leaves talking for later

days like islands