Wordlessness, again

Having not seen anything for a long time,
the yellow came as a surprise. Pixels like
javelins darting into orange, red, and finally
into a dark brown, somehow blacker than black.
Virtually all of the living creatures
with which I come into contact are terrified,
truly terrified, of me. Squirrels, cats, insects.
I think the humans just regard me with a frothy mix
of apprehension and befuddlement. I tell them
it’s not my fault but the words aren’t there,
and I can’t sign or signal.
When I woke up, it felt
like I had seen my way through a fight
– I was battered, limbs in need of peeling,
the feeling that a freight of steel
was parked behind my forehead.
Concussion marks streaking the pillow.
A song I hated greeted me,
followed by a song I liked,
and I realized they were the same,
but in my dream I could only hear
the good one, a quality of sound trick.

I learned to make do with less,
until all my artwork was
white flecks on a white canvas
and all music was hi-hats.
Friends were token statements,
typed with unfocused abandon,
barely signifying the likelihood
that we were thinking of each other,
and it mattered little whether
I was thinking of the violence
that might visit them, or of how
the same violence might dissipate.
Wanting to scream, I wrote a poem
about wordlessness, knowing that
it could never say anything to anyone.

You needed reinvention,
and you had to seek it elsewhere,
and you told me this
because I imagined
your fingers curling
their way through my hair
like a life turning on itself, though
of course you had no way
of knowing that I knew.
I worked on a self-portrait
but in it my hands looked frantic,
repeatedly signaling danger, danger.
Instead I would lie awake before dawn,
when the streetlights turn off
and for a half-hour
the windows actually go black,
and somehow that stillness
darkened and delirious
was enough.

The blessing in wordlessness
was forgetting about subjunctives.
There was only the life we were all living.
Awoken from the dream of silence,
I stood up, though my eyes weren't open.
I wanted to do push-ups,
and to sleep, and to
hold time in place,
stopping the gigantic carousel
that brings us closer for a second
before orbiting away.

Now that I have words again,
they don't seem to fit in the holes
I prepared. Big ones say little,
like "contrarily." Littles ones weigh
far too much, and we don't
exchange them freely. Our currency
remains the inflicting of pain
through the use of small, pointy words,
and we still forgive - not by saying,
"You are forgiven," but with kind deeds
that say, "I recognize your realness,
and I see that behind your
temperate forehead there is a mind,
a mind not unlike mine, a mind
whose existence will never be undone,
even when all the words we know
leave us in a silent fury."