#self-silencing

If

   the

spaces

between

these

      words

could

talk

they would say everything that I can't. They would be books numbered in volumes bound with the skin of my own bitten tongue, edged in gold leaf shining histories bright through the gaps in my clenched teeth, trying to slip out with each exhale but swallowed quick like sharp gasps.

There would be spy novels with the shadows of memories working deep cover behind an iron curtain, my heart Berlin in '75; my desire Paris in '42 French resistance clandestine whispering of loose lips sinking ships but keeping secrets like submarines and being crushed by the weight of that ocean; those murky waters inside me depth charged by anxiety booming adrenaline to make shockwaves in the sonar of my veins.

There would be the pulp noir shorts of holding what’s happened: grim scruff’ed and whiskey soaked, a half-lit cigar on a desk in the shadow of a dame, the truth a dossier of blurred photos and text that becomes a mobster grinning in black and white, the fingered trigger of a Tommy gun curved like the crescent of the hollowed out moon pulled to raise hell and rain lead, the victim the girl standing here now cut down in a hail of the past.

There would be sob stories masquerading as happy endings and tragedies dressed up like harlequin romances and these all anthologies of myself are not bookmarked or dog eared but pages fresh like paper cuts inside of my mouth split open by keeping it closed, but I can't recite a single line because if I do

that might make them real. It might make the pages of these plays become acts not on a stage and no longer just stories I keep reading to myself.

And it seems better that I should throw these books inside me on a fire and be burned up with them; to let the smoke of their ink curl thick from my lips and the tinder of their spines be the glow of my ribs,

My voice is strained from the silent screams (i try and scream aloud and they get caught, choked on, and then I wake-up)

dammit, I want to be listened to heard 

A sense of urgency compels me to shout out loud (LOUD, ya that's what I said)

My voice is outspoken, outrageous

out-raged

ready to stare-daggers through the immobilizing heat 

beating down my neck, my throat into my mouth (stifling me)

it's shoving itself in

and on and no one can see the smoky-shadow

it's taking me (whispers quickly dissipate into the other-world of unknowns, unheards, and never coming backs)

thrusting my autonomy down my own throat

it's pushing me under my own broken glass ceiling

where the fuck did i disappear to?

My voice would cry if the tears were not parched

the idea glistens on the strings of my vocal chords

the idea reminiscent of a fragile violin solo

eerily poignant and frightfully tragic

smile crosses the lips now stained with tears

She's a frightened beautiful woman

strong, resilient

and yet,

standing in front of herself 

she only sees the deep lines of beautiful stretched skin

perhaps not from a child growing in her belly

 but just her body welcoming itself into it's own

she can't accept the deeply coveted "curves" 

(they leer and jeer at her on the streets)

the whistles, catcalls, whinnies and hollers are like she were a horse in a race, to be ridden, prized...owned

embarrassed and shamed for words not her own

she can pretend Ignore.