Eating my Words

“Don’t eat your words” they say “speak up clearly!” they bellow but do not seem to know that my lips may curve with every syllable but no sound follows – just grunts, mumbles, and winces a meek orchestra of diffidence.

we tell a screaming child with an obvious deep gash in the knee not to scream so loudly so we may understand how they fell down when their palms are already bleeding their faces turned into frowns we still say, “now use your words”; as if that will pick you back off the earth

words that I inhaled as they were fed in classrooms and textbooks and romance novels but words that deserted me as I searched my mind to find the right words that just might make you see why my legs are so tight and my face turned away but you push anyway somehow suddenly deaf to my words as they fall against your ear as I struggled and fought, I’m pretty sure I told you to stop.

but that’s the thing with words we only hear them when they serve our selfish purpose but most of the time we are too busy bustling around with our agendas to fulfill and tasks to compete and people to beat that we forget to stop and simply talk until one day a detective suddenly calls to say your brother decided to end it all and you sit on the airplane for eight hours wondering why the hell didn’t he say anything?

maybe he did. just like I did. just like the screaming child with a scraped knee shouldn’t have to speak for his mother to see that he’s hurting. maybe words are nothing more than a complicated composition of a monotone track that always sounds the same because we only hear what we want to and let all the other words slip into the crevices of folded pages –

so I dine by candlelight tonight as I devour my feast of words that are soaked in grief and pain and hurt the ink running down my chin as I spit them out on paper thin enough to be made of ash but for the first time the only thing strong enough to hold the weight of honest words.