Even the silence was silent, and it was you,
all up inside my head; I couldn’t quite make it out
that spring that came with a roar beyond and above
these figs, all looking so rusty, so ugly, the way
they plopped to the ground. some people getting less
and some more. I must not have always been like this.
There is something so demoralising about watching
the habits, gestures and behaviour of others;
I’d never once thought about it before.
But life is loneliness and one can never outrun it.
I am simply my own silence. I close my eyes
and hear the world in constant motion outside me,
happy, I have been inadequate all along.
I am my own silence. All I heard was the bray
of my heart- this is the song of a mad girl.
I need to fabricate an outgoing nature so
that I might gather the guts to want something.
There is so very much I want to learn, and
I came dangerously close to wanting nothing,
So from here and now, all that despair, the feeble parts,
every hellfire of every nightmare and each time
the blackness gallops in at night- I intend to live it,
feel it, and somehow find a happy home far from fire.
All the world I must have taken for granted,
viewing it through small cramped eyes, always so
introspectively passive and melancholy.
Now I’ve learnt more of it, I am not so easily fooled
by false faces dressed up and painted blue and red.
There is a way out and it’s not a constant, I know this.
From that despair and woe you can come ricocheting
towards a sense of fulfilment, laughter, and even hope.
The trouble is that we always boomerang back- but it’s
just a matter of time- for a time I believed in mermaids.
When you kissed me I felt my lungs fill like trees with
something beautiful but certainly annihilating.
Dying is arbitrary, Anyone can do it but why want to
even if there’s no meaning to be found and even if
madness itself takes you out on a moonlit waltz.
A fellow student asked- who are you? I am. I am. I am.
A girl with horrible limitations, too many neuroses
and a desire for companionship, other than an illusory
feathered thing that sits on me nightly. She replied-
I don’t know who I am either, but why drives you?
I do it because it feels like hell, because it feels real.
Committing suicide is not creative expression, she replied,
and it’s not a statement, and you have a life to live, so why?
The words were released, held in since ten years old
when I first tried it; the words that I couldn’t explain.-
I guess you could say I’ve a call, I said. One moment
and she put her hand on mine, and lowered her voice
to a murmur, said, cut the telephone off at the root
so the voices won’t get through. I shut my eyes and
wondered if I had really made her up inside my head.
