Bad Word Day

Help! I have gone dumb!
A momentary panic.
There are no words in my head today.
The silence in here is like a room,
Left too long, to become chill and damp,
Begging for its fire to be lit.

In my left eye, the gatepost leans guiltily.
In my right, the gate yawns abeam, unpadlocked.
And now my words are running loose, unfettered.
Some, the smaller monosyllabics, will be getting into mischief.
Stuck in hedges, or disrupting traffic on the local roads.
The larger, more intelligent ones, will have assumed false identities,
And infiltrated the towns about, to keep appointments,
With hairdressers, opticians and dentists.
A few, too timid for the busy world outside,
Will sniff each other´s arses, and loop into circles,
Soundlessly reiterating themselves,
Referencing neither memory or presence,
Displaced from the wider flock that gave them meaning.
Soon, they will grow weary and settle.

So my words, have a holiday,
From all that heavy semantics.
All that pointing at each other with firm, but adaptable, intent.
The baring and buttressing required,
To sustain a human worldview.

Now, the Silence in me, become complete,
Expands to engulf the grey, arrested day,
And I find my face has turned to granite, high and massive.
Monumental, geomorphic, impervious to wind or thought.
With a patient, pitiless sea, swirling at my knees,
Far below, with foamed teeth.
My inaccessible slopes have become places
For the hovering gulls to build their nests.
My facets clogged with their centuries accretions,
And the tiny grapplings of windborne moss and lichens.
I have become the towering acceptance of the dark
Insides of tall, unmindful rocks.

Panic passed.
Content with bare existence.
My words, I know, will return by end of day.
They always do.
They all need each other to mean anything at all, and thus to be.
And so, perhaps, need me more than I need them.
Until then,
I will just stare, heavy and totemic,
Out upon that steel and silver sea,
Regardless of the empty wheels traced by the white gulls´ flight.
An emissary from the deep red dark, at the heart´s rock
Of this strange, transparent planet.

Copyright © John Ferngrove 2009