Unread

I am grieving the absence of language

Not because I enjoy words

Not because I write poems

Because language is the organ through which I experience existence

Remove it, and I bleed internally

I have spent my life translating pain into something survivable

How I buried the dead

How I loved the living

How I crossed impossible distances
without moving an inch

When my father died
language sat beside me

When loneliness hollowed out entire rooms, language remained

When I could not carry the weight of my own life, language carried part of it for me

I have always made homes from words

Built shelters from sentences

Lit lanterns against darkness with nothing more than a line of poetry

Even now

Standing in the aftermath of my own confession

I reach instinctively toward words

The way a drowning creature reaches toward air

Because language is not the record of my life

Language is my life

And lately

For the first time I can remember

I have been unable to find a single sentence
large enough to hold what is happening to me

That frightens me more than the thing itself