This silence

This silence would be deafening

if you could hear it, still.

It broke you years ago, when

you were seized with a fit

of wanting needing so violent

you dug your way out through

your own skin to escape the

stunning cruelty of the

everpause between the

asking and never receiving.

You bled yourself in

payment for what did not,

would not come.

You did not think to ask

for a receipt.

Maybe this silence was

always deaf to you too.

Imagine that:

a deaf silence.

The world becomes something

altogether kinder, if we know

nothing exists that can hear

some of us, and not others.

There are those who swear

they hear, and are heard.

They insist that this silence

excavates their fossilized prayers—

readily willingly mercifully

just in the nick of this time

and that time too—

from somewhere inside the black

crevasse of palms touching.

You have stopped (almost)

longing to be one of them.

You are alone.

You put yourself to bed

at night and listen to your

own prayers as they

whimper, then settle,

in the dark.

You are the only one

who can hear the four-letter

words howling fire

and spitting bile

and leapfrogging

in your belly.

You are not mute (yet)

but you know better (now)

than to ask this silence

just one more time

about the unanswerables

the unmentionables

the unhaveables

the unavailables

the unassailables.

You are nothing much to everyone in particular.

You are no one's one.

You are especially nothing to a few.

You are everything to two for as long as

it will be until you are not.

Yes, this silence

would be deafening

if you could hear it,

still.