The Voice Will Keep Returning

A voice does no good 
full volume into the breech 
of negative space unheeding 
Now I’m suddenly granted a platform 
I hope I’ve a rasp left for any audience 

I’d LIKE to say:
This is simply who I am 
and I’m just a nobody 
as representative of everybody 
as anybody else 

And: 
You don’t know how it feels 
to make sounds in places soundproofed 

I’ve cleared my throat approximately 
five hundred times since morning 
Straining against a constricting trachea 
Not meant to breathe indifference 
or the air’s more hostile elements 

My truth may not be your truth 
but it’s the only truth that fuels me 
and I see now that it isn’t so much that 
it’s hard to understand me 
It’s hard to just admit you have 
it IN YOU to understand me 
without seeing images of a carpenter 
your people say built the world against me 

That’s what some people say 
but the carpenter tells me different 

The sounds are on my tongue 
as my vocabulary’s reconnecting 
Some things are said for no purpose 
No benefit besides the entitlement 
to shed them 

When I love, I’m proud of loving 
My regard isn’t just for anatomy 
I’m not led around by hard-ons 
But by the interweaving sinews 
of something within me,
around me and more than me 

And the dam that holds the words back 
might be broken unless it opens 
to release mounting pressure 
that froths with pent up steam 

So the voice will keep returning tr
despite the air that keeps thinning 
The words will keep slipping 
and I can’t promise I’ll try to catch them 
because no one has that many aquariums

The sinews will keep stretching outward, 
upward, then downward 
Coursing through roots and filaments 
that riot to feel them 

And if that makes me a devil 
Hell must be purest Heaven 

My truth will keep fueling me 
and I’ll keep refueling willingly 
as I keep understanding 
that you might keep CHOOSING 
to misinterpret me 

I’ll never finish talking 
to myself or to you 
‘til it stops feeling the 
same most times as talking
to high strangers 

I’ll fashion words into olive branches 
or, if called for, into razors 

Yes, I will fashion words 
to do the work of polygraphs 
Separate my dawgs from the vaguely 
canine sewer rats 
Committing to memory 
every spike and honest line 

Words are all they’ve allowed me 
but not all I’ll allow myself