So, I said

I fall asleep on the worn leather sofa

the previous renters left behind

after they found the kitchen leaks.

We don’t mind the waves and currents.

 

We brought flowering plants in

from outside, in hopes to make the

air between us more breathable.

I learned today that orchids are parasites

living in the elbows of tropical trees.

 

I begin my sentences with pronouns

followed by verbs, while you stick to

the conjunction “so”. So, the kitchen

 

floor needs bailing again.

I suggest we install a drain and let the floods

come and go as they please.

 

2:03, pm. When I fall asleep on the leather sofa,

I rest my head on the copy of Neruda’s

“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”

that you gave me, hoping the words bleed through

and we’ll have something in common.

Speechless

A mountain stream of thought: clarity. Pouring from a vacuum, in the midst of which I stand, there is language. A prairie of lowercase letters sway in the breeze of speech, interrupted only by the unruly height of the occasional “l” or “b”. Beyond lies the forest of the uppercase. Beginnings wait there, between the trunks of our “P’s” and “Q’s”.

I collapse into the lowercase, covered, drowning in codependent words like “such” and “as”. I strain my jaw open to take a breath and find that language is already there, flooding in and out of my lungs so that I am suffocating.

The words are written, unspoken, debilitating, decapitating, broken and meaningless without context; the words are a hell of nonentity, the words are smoke in my lungs, the words are poison in my thoughts – the words are… O! the words!

Speak, I command myself. The oxygen slowly seeps from my bloodstream as I sprawl out in speechless agony. I grasp for something spoken. The world is turning dark; I clasp the closest set of phonemes and speak:

Help.