LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES

This was written during a meeting chaired by a manipulative bully!


Words irrupt into the silver silence
Flowing molten. Viscous, honeyed gold
Sticky, sudden sentences soar, sink, and stumble.

Horrid old slights reverberate in the aftermath of heated debate.
Velvet, vicious verbs. Turgid and torrid Phrases
Totter, teem, tower, topple, and tumble.
Falling, they are picked up again, carried forward
To challenge, charm, chop, and change minds,
Becoming shields against poison darts.

Sentence parts become barricades. Beginnings, endings.
Hues, and cries of blacks and whites, old and young.
The Future's perfect; the Present tense.

In the past, I could have bitten off my tongue - yet,
When the voice is spent, we have but poor choice and less sense.
Bending the light, words glimmer, glow, burn.
Illuminating dark corners, they burn Iridescent,

Etiolating the light of love in eyes once warm.
They bedim the sun and the crescent moon.
Outliving the deed, echoing forever. Uttered too soon.

Still spinning yarns in the eye of the storm.
Resounding, well rounded, we follow the thread.
"You're dead! Right?" Truth lies.
Whether light or gravely said
Words delay caresses, pose questions. Who cares!

Who cares? Dangerous intimacy for those who dare silence.
Silence, pregnant with pauses. Words unborn
Still born promises. Love aborted. Hope bleeds
With every hurt unheard, every unmet need.
Moments hammered into memory, meaning shoehorned,
Stammered into effects without causes.

Juggernauted tenderness trundles into velvet violence.
Hugger-mugger, juggling, jostling jocular clauses
Better unuttered. Can we escape the prison sentences
And come home to the still freedom of a momentary silence?