Unspoken Word

I.

As a child I spoke when spoken to,

learned my place as children often do

and stayed there,  

a still and silent thing, the picture

of assigned perfection, a portrait

of good-little-girl obedience, painted

by the refined strokes of the bible belt

across my back.

By adolescence, my mouth was a tight fist

where words were folded,

like my fingers to my palms,

an arsenal of unloaded weapons.

I sucked

the intentional hand, seeking to shut up my mouth

or extract words, like teeth.

I chewed my nails ragged,

swallowed the dead remains

and fed on silence to stave the threat of violence

and its dark premonitions.

Fear found fodder and took root

in the damp and toxic dump

of broken meanings, cast off words,

and useless verbs,

a heap

of what wasn’t said,

my funeral bed

of hot and smothered shame,

and every time I failed to claim

the air and muscle to speak my name,

I died another suicide.   

Death was a bad habit.

II.

Your silence will not protect you, the poet said.*

Instead, two possibilities exist:

the risk of speaking one’s mind

or the small and petty deaths that over time

wreak tragedy.

In other words,

there is no middle road.

There’s no half-way to say: “No!”

No, I will not shut up.

No, you will not beat up the verbs

that emerge from my throat.

No, I refuse to choke

on unspoken words.

III.

As I cut my wisdom teeth,

I gnawed the bone of my own fear and grief

and dared to speak, as if words would save me,

which is why I’m speaking to you now,

as if somehow you will hear me,

mouthing what you cannot speak, to say:

Your silence betrayed me.

You believed your indecision was benign.

You walked ahead, left me behind,

remained silent, as if blinded by the violent onslaught

of human flesh, aimed and launched at me, the easy mark,

as if you were deaf to the words, slurred

to name and shame me.

I do not blame you

for what you could not do then.

But your unforgivable sin is

you refuse to speak of it now,

and somehow, you do not see me,

even as you examine my face, smooth rouge

over the bruises darkening my flesh, paint

the jagged scar, marking my lips.

I am no victim,

but to say I’ve survived

suggests I didn’t die

with the dark prints of two hands

around my neck

IV.

Perhaps, it’s my demise and rise

from the flames of another’s fury that makes

for my impatient wait,

for the audible naming and claiming

of who you are,

where you’ve been,

of what you haven’t said.

We are poets.

Words grow on our tongues,

become food, giving life for our living

or they are the rocks that weight our pockets

for our drowning beneath the river’s rage.

There is no written page to read,

no chapter or verse

to memorize or rehearse

the words, lining our lungs.

This is improvisational speaking—

the un-sensational stanza and rhyme,

the un-extraordinary poetry of our ordinary lives.

The poet wrote,

Everything we write

will be used against us

or against those we love.

These are the terms,

take them or leave them.

Poetry never stood a chance

of standing outside history.**

What she meant to convey is no mystery.

Our poetry and prose is so pretty,

but we never stood a chance of escaping a stance.

The freedom of speech is not free of responsibility.

The price tag of our ability to speak measures the cost, the loss

of our careless and casual spending of the pennies that bought our thoughts.

Our silence costs as much,

bears the burden wrought

by what was lost, by who

we sacrificed for our fears.

V.

I see that you are broken.

I hear your stunted, stuttered, and unspoken words.

But you are not so fragile.

You will not break beneath the weight

of words you can’t erase or revise.

Our silence and lies are as dead and deadly

as the knives we pull from our backs.

My intention is not to judge or to preach

but to somehow reach across the chasm

of these words unsaid to say:

When you speak it,

I will hear you.

© Ami Mattison

* Excerpt by Audre Lorde 

** Excerpt by Adrienne Rich

Flickr photo courtesy of AJ Baxter

For One Stop Poetry's One Shot Wednesday