This poem revolves around the violence of invisibility. It is the sound of thoughts trapped in a mouth that cannot speak, words which collapse before they can live. Even in this personal silence, there is life, stubborn as always, with ideas and thoughts refusing to vanish completely.
I sit among the cuckoo birds like a branch detached from every tree. They rise, brilliant, carving beaks into hairy caterpillars, and I taste my own silence, thick, metallic, period blood.
I try to speak. Words shiver like the frightened cuckoos, then collapse before they touch communal air. Thoughts twist inside my wood, the echo of my tongue beats against pearly whites. I'm hammering a concrete wall.
They laugh. Sharp. "Nice". The branch shudders.
I want to tell them something, just anything... A sound. A whisper. A fragment of this stupid, splintered piece of wood.
But every word melts back into me before it finds another host.
I am fire that cannot touch. Flames lick the cuckoos' feathers, the red floor of conversation. They are bright. They are dangerous. They are utterly ignored.
My hands curl around imaginary ashes, fingers tracing the outline of what I could've spoken One... Two... Three minutes ago I am trapped in possibilities, yet paralyzed in execution.
Rarely, a sentence comes into being. I watch it rise, helium-filled, float past me, and I let it go, to grasp it would scorch the branch alive.
I'm raw. Tired of chasing cuckoos who spit careless laughter and vanish, leaving me to stalk the carcass of their brilliance.
Infinity. Infinity. Infinity. I am never done chasing the circle; The distance? "The remainder of Pi" endless miles I cannot run. I cannot follow.
I leave this circle, it is not for me. Circles suffocate me now, they smother, they crush; triangles slash, edges sharp enough to scar, raw and open. They are concise.
