Poem

Words – long and short, stilted and fluent. Building blocks, communication, vocalisat-

fuckers everyone of them

Mouth teeth lips, alveolial trills, stomach talki-

Eat me you traitors, mouth lips teeth, eat me, chew your words chew your filthy food, eat and ignore, smoke inhale and abandon, cut off from the raw, the

Tongue of an amputee my tongue is an amputee my tongue a stump my tongue the stump my tongue is an amputee

But then

words
 
the sapling stump, a poking yellow tendril is there and it grows and there is sunlight and rain and it grows again and

the words! 

the words grow too, bubbling, branching away, blooming, blossoming, from one to another, until a  canopy of hope and eloquence is there, floating and

in my mind

it is penetrative, sweet, cutting sheer like crystal.

And then it’s

empty

a dream I think, because again my stump bangs against

raw

my inside teeth, pathetic, short, chompy, thick, useless.

dead?

It won’t grow just by thinking, I think and I think and force it.
 I don’t know what happened, I only had it for the minute but I want the trees again.

But my tongue
brain
shrivels in my throat and it was a dream a dream it was all just a dream, and my tongue is an amputee.