My Words

My voice is lost. I can’t speak.
The words are there on my mind in practiced rhythm, but speech falters.
Syllables get caught up on my tongue,
rolling over each other in a stuttering (repeating, repeating) mess.
I lose my thoughts and a deep red spreads up my cheeks
as I’m thrown into a twisting and churning sea of babbling nonsense.

I am strange, voiceless.
I cannot say what I mean so I don’t say anything at all and it’s quiet,
deafening quiet until ideas and hurts and passions and pains and answers
build and build and build
and there’s nowhere left to go but tearing out through my lungs
in one rebellious cry of sound and fury.
A loud cacophonous clatter of sounds and words and empty phrases
floating in empty space, meaning nothing, saying nothing.

They are lost. My voice is lost. There is nothing left to say.
The world isn’t listening anyway.

**

But here. Here there is release.

Here on this page, pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, I write.
In a clack, clack, clack, scratch, scratch, scratch, I write.
Words spill, splash, pour from me, onto the page.
Words, words, words released and running free,
stampeding from my mind, fingertips, every pore,
a force of glorious energy that wraps around me in cozy warmth,
fills the page with me in a soundless scream.

All at once I can be strange and awkward and stuttering,
say what I mean, mean what I say,
talk in circles and round and round until it makes complete nonsensical sense of this,
this beautiful mess of words and verbs and question marks.

Formed from thought, like clay, molded and laced and pieced together,
sentences take shape, paragraphs and pages, pages telling a story, 
winding, weaving together in a vibrant tapestry of vision, concept, imagination.
A reckless abandon of flowing consciousness.

Where at last, at last
my voice can speak.

Here, here are my words.