strangle you with panic

I get upset, and the words disappear.

They're gone, and yet they're waiting

right there, trying to find me

so that I can expunge them, so that I can bleed the emotions

onto the page and release myself

from the growing pressure that builds underneath my skin.

It feels like choking. Or suffocation, sometimes.

Or drowning. Drowning on dry land, somehow unable to breathe

the oxygen all around me.

My words suffocate me, steal the air I breathe right out of my lungs

and leave me gasping for some way to speak,

some way to communicate my distress.

But no one can hear me, because I have no air—and no words.

I sit here drowning

under the weight of words I cannot speak,

trying to reach out to the people around me

but never knowing how.

Who would listen to me, anyways,

when I have no words to say what is wrong?

When I have no way to explain

why I'm upset, or even to cry out for help,

for someone to show me how to save myself from drowning in all these words?

I can't. I never could.

The words disappear, and yet

they bottleneck all the same, strangling me

with my inability. They pile up

at the back of my throat, crowding onto my tongue—and yet none

of them ever pass my lips.

And so I choke on them. I suffocate,

trying to reach out and lift the weight

that holds these words down inside me, but I never can,

not in enough time—and the words die inside,

shrivel and wither away

until there is nothing left of them—of me—but dust of

what might have been said, what might have been understood.

Until there is only the husk of someone that might have been saved.

It is only when the knot behind my heart

gets too big, when it starts pulling around my throat

until I feel like I can't breathe,

because I'm drowning drowning drowning,

the water closing over my head and forcing its way down my throat

and into my lungs;

water, water water water with no air and no oxygen

and my lungs are spasming, trying to force the water out

only to let more water in—except it's not water, it's words,

so many words,

words of pain and joy and fear and terror and sorrow and rapture and comprehension and change,

and by forcing out the water—forcing out the words—I only let more

tumble in, and I can never breathe.

I can never catch my breath.

My words steal it away,

steal away my air,

steal away my life.

Without my words, I am nothing—and yet, I am crushed

beneath their weight, because when I need them most

they turn into half-forgotten ghosts,

things I cannot touch, but things that still weigh me down.

I need to find them. I need to reach them,

to slash open the vein they hide within

and spill them out on the pages before me, their ink spreading

across the pristine white of the paper

until it's only a jumble, and a mess to be deciphered.

I need to rid myself of these words, to bleed myself dry

of their pressure so that I can breathe again, so that I can live again.

But I don't know where to find the words.

I don't know where to find the right pen or pencil

to puncture the place they hide,

and I don't know if I can stop the flow once it starts.

I don't know if I have the right tools, the right thoughts.

My words have disappeared from me,

and left me to drown in the void where they are supposed to be.