scream

(kinda impromptu; probably needs a second edit – suggestions are welcome; just wanted to put it out there anyways)

I thought that if I spoke, it’d be enough.
I thought my voice would be enough.
I thought A Voice would be enough –
but it never is, is it?
It isn’t enough to speak.
We need somebody to listen.
I could scream until the voice inside of me became a voice outside of me and my skin felt like a semi-permeable membrane through which I exchanged my voice with the outside world –
I could become a plasmolysed cell,
and still it wouldn’t be enough
if no one fucking listened.

see something we tend to forget sometimes
(we being a term
for the artists of this world –
the screamers and believers
born of this earth)
something we tend to forget sometimes
is that homo sapiens really shouldn’t be able to write
or question their own existence or dance or draw
we kinda seem to know
of some kind of magic that makes us
raise our voices
not just to warn the tribe
of an incoming attack,
but to inspire the weather worn pack
we invented math
not just to count the number of apples that fell from the tree
and divide that by the people of the clan
but to define linear vector spaces
and understand the composition of quarks

and – the point of this isn’t to say
that we are special – there is no doubt
of that – what I am trying to convey
is that apart from that last example
on math, our “unique” comes from weird acts
that feel like the dissertations of our souls
rain that should not care about whether the ground is their to catch it,
but like rain, falls only because of the gravity of someone to catch us as we fall –

I could scream until my insides dried out
like a sponge the washerwoman squeezed too many times
and have nothing left to say,
still it wouldn’t be enough
without a bucket to hold my tears
and catch my words
when I cry.

We need somebody to listen.
I could scream until the voice inside of me became a voice outside of me and my skin felt like a semi-permeable membrane through which I exchanged my voice with the outside world –
I could become a plasmolysed cell,
and still it wouldn’t be enough
if no one fucking listened.