wordage

School is massively bleh.

I hope this quarter passes quickly.

Also, it is very very hot outside.

- - -

this heart has longly known silence and
speech has clunked for almost twenty-one years

language, always venerated, sheathed
in gold and placed beside the old crucifix of
the childhood home,
seems now to fail only wretchedly

similarly are all the idols wrapped,
anointed and made supreme with genuflection
sometimes knees get old, they age, begin to
crackle a bit when bent with unwarned celerity

my speech is old, it crackles, sometimes gets
stuck like indigestion in the abdomen,
sends nausea up instead

I would not wish to vomit on gold
I would not wish to expel the internal carcass
all across the hand-sewn silks of
whose faith this all is

silence thrives not in confinement—
a prisoner, it paces just beneath the flesh and
in its solitude it sings a dirge—
a crime-ridden shame-laden funeral song
for the corpse it has inlaid for all the years

I’ve watched many a prison documentary, heard
about the evils and the ills, seen how the
grotesque justice sends electric arcs through
a chair—a resting place—and I have seen how the
murderers are murdered

my mind returns then
to that faith of my youth, to the overarching
quiet, so submerged, to the prayers
they all hope will rise

let this rise, now—an elegy for the body,
for the silence, for the murder, for the murderer,
for the deafness that is everywhere

lamentation seems the only way to
fill the murderous and imprisoned spaces