Silence

Silence surrounded by speech

is its own language.

Posed silence

makes for the rhetorical

with down turns

of deducible sarcasms

or well pleaded cynicisms

buried in lost tonal refrains.

Either way, the sting is muted

but the welling is real.

I am all a body

of inflamed inner ears,

drumming for myself,

for there is no response

made out of the continuance.

Silence, as conversation,

yields more of the same silence

until all the meaning is fading

into memory as a phase,

having lost its sharpness

of immediacy and its poignancy

for being topic driven and justified.

By then, there is an emptiness

like an off-season floodplain.

There is billboard posture

as a blank screen faking sky.

The tongue fidgets

against a fence

of teeth enamel restraint.

The mind murmurs

towards muted self-conversation.

Conclusions puff up

in feigning a mindful repose

but nothing really is conjoined

into movement.

Many things

of mundane human interest

go unattended.

Perception, as an initiator,

dulls to the task.

Somber is the summons

though inadvertently induced.

Once this has all jellified

into a positioned mood,

there is the great call out

from deep within

like a beached sea creature

in unnatural consternation.

Out of sorts and timing

to all response opportunities

are laden with crestfallen debris

from disappointment’s lot.

And spirit is not an easy wing

to put to sky by deed.

I’ll have to order

directly from the menu.

For I have been here before,

eating the same meal

but I will pretend

to be the waitress and the cook

and order myself something

I cooked up as a special.

This process includes

thorough digestion and a tip.

Only then can I walk out

into the rest of my life

with some

apparently meaninglessness

as conversation

that uses silence.

And once again with silence

but this time

as a way

of having presence

fill the spacing

between the words.