A Language Beyond

It rushes on if I contain it I'll drown 
Maybe it'll help someone breathe after I 
let it out 

Feels like there won't be an after 
Like it'll never stop 
But only one global flood was  
ever sanctioned by God 
Long before I first erred or acted right 
that saga seethed consequence 
and was done

No way to tabulate how many 
souls swept away 
that's what our patient Lord 
had already been driven to 
when I made Him deal 
with my comprehensive fuck ups 

Didn't mean for this to be about that 
but everything's about God ultimately 
whatever we write about 
or whatever we're bleeding or 
bandaging each other for 

The high steeple signposting 
where the sermon is 
The sagging roof of the 
condemned house 
where vagrants live 
Existence even being permitted 

It was supposed to just be 
about being too talkative 
Thinking of everything I could 
and using up all of it 
in just one poem 
like I'm doing this alone 

Just spillage til it met a cross current 
that pulls my voice and verse with it 
to the shore of more urgent purpose 

A certainty somehow imparted 
Telling me take my time, be selective 
More words say much less 
You can either be precise or hectic 

So a poem that would have been about 
letting loose landslides of every known word 
too harried to express what they bury 
or making the captive reader witness 
me detoxify my tesseract head 
is instead about letting my words listen 
when something says "Stop talking 
over the sacred" 

Let quiet write in your cosmic particles 
in a language beyond vocabulary's end