Face first into your trusted brick wall coated in familiar disappointment.
Stuck once again in these eternal few seconds,
your attempt at human connection meets its painfully acquainted limbo.
What was once vibrant expression, felled cold by genetic variation.
Takes and ideas culled beautifully at heart,
mindlessly mangled by defective transmission,
Mind’s success succeeded by Body’s failure.
A debilitating silence of pain and pressure,
as speech’s freedom is rent from you.
Restored with guaranteed uncertainty,
the cruelest rinse and repeat.

A perpetual grinding,
mauled between suffering silence and suffering speech.
For every urge to utter,
there is a mountain’s weight in ball and chain.
Confidence worn down by gambles,
a sentence’s delivery more unsure than a table of poker.
Words wound in anxiety, “did I really have to speak??”
Syllables steeped in fear, “does my torment take root here??”

“It’s barely noticed”, retorts to your aid.
Inversely a choking reminder, how much of you died unsaid.
The array of instances you silenced yourself as a sad solution.
The many hopeful inhales with the promise of interaction,
only to let out mute anguish and seeming self-defeat.
How much vocabulary through which you bob and weave,
words learned for the purpose of knowing NOT to use,
all for a crooked bare minimum of expression.
Haunted by alphabets you’ve learned to fear more than death,
in their power to halt your already staggering ability to connect.
Weird mannerisms, disgraceful contortions,
in a desperate bid to barely simply tell.
That “funny story”? My trial by fire.
Casual conversation, a verbal minefield.
Vocalisation? Risk.

Quiet tired screams, a mind cratered deep,
mental writhings to this insidious bottlenecking.
In the silent sounds dwell resultant refuge,
where the only stutters exist in a faulty pen.
A solitary tradeoff, a peaceful desolation.
“Look on the bright side, it could always be worse”
At the end of these platitudes is a bleak return to your sparsely better darkness.
In this version of living, boxed up by a bad voice box,
where communication is a shaky promise with promised failures,
worse may actually be better.

Half, than none, may be less and not more.

 

 

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash