lingua franca of silence

language should be unnecessary, toxic even,

bile dripping off our tongues.

what is the purpose of an artifice like language,

a combination of sounds strung syntactically into

what we call sentences and falsely believe

hold meaning that no one will ever misinterpret.

I was born without a voice.

to not speak as a child is to be labeled as shy,

pinned like a butterfly to the sidewalk pavement

while others draw your outline in chalk.

you try to call out, but there is a silence that follows,

as if there is a cloud clogging your throat.

if mis-communication is all words can offer,

then why even attempt to make sense with them?

why not saddle elephants like spoons brimming with leather coffee?

there are professors who will stand before you

lifting lofty words to the heavens

building temples out of blocks of dictionaries

pontificating their conjectures sans plebeian verbiage

but in the end, saying nothing.

each attempt to elucidate a notion implodes,

the listener waiting eagerly for the speaker to finish

so he too can show what words he knows.

saying absolutely nothing, meaning nothing, signifying nothing.

there is a confusion less telling than silence

and that is the noise of trying to say something

because there is pain in attempting to describe humans

(even the taste of pineapple)

in words

that seem to fail, always fail.

in fact, there is only one language

which each person understands and that

is silence.

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