What’s in a word?

A word can make you violent

A word can break the silence

A word can bring a smile

A word can induce a sigh

What is it about words, I always wondered

That made it or broke it ?

My mother spoke beautiful words mostly,

sometimes she was nasty and out came those hateful words frothing and festering with anger

like maggots on a rotting wound.

So did my father

I was uncertain about the words they would bestow upon me each day

So I searched for more crueler words

More kinder words

More expensive words

More colorful words

More musical words

To paint up my sky of sound and vocabulary

To lighten the impact of what their words caused me

To reduce the pain in my heart

I too frothed out dreadful words

Guiltier words.

Sometimes, as an experiment, I would

Say compassionate and artistic words

Couplets and poems adorned my walls

They did little to ease my painful silence.

The pain of being silent

Ah ! it is this that I hid,

behind all the words that came out

Pain and silence

The stillness of it

The rawness like a new wound, pink and painful

No words can describe pain or silence

Not even this poem that is in the process of its writing

Not even pain

Not even silence can explain the pain and the silence of the loss of words.

I must be silent now

For it is night

And in the night

The pain has a mind of its own.