These will be the words I never say,

The words that cover my ink-stained hands.

Trembling, anxious.

With a bitter ferocity that reverberates

Back and forth,

In my chest and the ligaments of my fingers,

The words that echo and bounce off my eyelids,

As I tiredly watch people’s glossy dull stares,

And their lips dancing at a rapid force.

The words spilling like droplets of rain over a fallen leaf,

no one can notice the subtle differences

and I’m trapped in a canvas of mouths,

weaving their own poetry.

But mine isn’t as languid and free flowing,

My words are raw.

To the core where guts spill out and I can finally feel

The luscious sensation of consonants and vowels play on my lips,

And a scream ricochets off the walls but no one turns...

I am solely mute.

The voice of a lamb that passersby will incessantly ask,

“Excuse me?”

Quiet does not equate to the word “calm”

Nor “sweet,”

Not even, perhaps, “anti-social.”

Dealing with my own demons cannot be expressed

Verbally through simple words and a voice.

It cannot convey the complicated emotions

I feel for my alienated future,

Nor the surge of energy for leaving stages of my life behind,

Cannot begin to express the turmoil of hormones between both genders,

Or the belief of not belonging to one single place completely,

Cannot express how I look at your brown eyes.

These are the words I will never say.