NEPENTHE

Alexithymia

My mind, a vast gaping black hole,

Where thoughts blossom like newborn stars,

And feelings, both angelic and venomous,

Effervesce into being.

A messy melange of fear and rage,

Untamed joy and frightening love,

Calculations, deductions and sharp queries,

Seductive dreams of my ambitions and desires,

And repulsive nightmares that claw me past endurance.

These are the lovely jumbled thoughts,

That clutter my brain.

My chaotic thoughts are chaotic enough,

But when turned into words by my tongue,

They become ciphers

Hieroglyphic, irrelevant and amazingly dull.

I wish I didn't have to chop down,

My exquisitely free, hyperactive musings

Into chained-up, lethargic human words.

I am, but a woman of little expression,

My eyes deadpan, my lips a coldly symmetric line,

My tongue kidnapped and held ransom

By alexithymia, by fear of being too different,

By fear of being a cliché.

My thoughts bleed out of my skull

And float like lost souls around my silent head,

All the things I never said,

All the things I'll never say.

But wait!! Ineffectual words birthed by my tongue,

Are not the only way to make myself be understood.

My lost souls plunge their fingertips in luminous blue ink,

And leaves their sweet fingerprints in soft newsprint,

Tell-tale signs of individuality, of uniqueness, of self.

The meaning as clear as clean glass.

My ink-kissed words are the only weapon I have,

To say what I'm too afraid to say out loud,

To express those emotions too fiery to be imprisoned by,

My quivering voice.

(And I'm never interrupted in verse!)

To give opinions without fear or shame,

And to state the most delicate of truths.

My thoughts find a way to assert themselves,

Not through my emotionless eyes,

Not through my cheating tongue,

But through written words,

Gliding slow like an ecstatic glacier from my fingers,

Far, far beyond beautiful.