The Hole

After a cigarette
smoked so quickly
on the cold porch
that I can feel the cells
in my lungs dying,
I come back to my room
and shut the door
and think about the hole
in my words.

There’s a place
in my speech
that is void.
I know I must fill it
but the words that will be required
terrify me.
They’re hiding in my room with me.
In the closet, on the bottom
shelf, under the bed —
shards of language waiting
to be pieced together,
and I can’t face them.

I find myself thinking
not that, not that
whenever I open my mouth.
It’s not that I don’t know
what I should be saying —
it’s that what I should be saying
scares the breath out of me.

Picture my daily sentences
swerving around the hole. Words
whir like cars around a traffic circle,
entering pre-designated roads,
leaving the big space in the middle
untouched.

This is not about art
or science. The hole in my language
is thousands of miles deep
and if I fall in I’ll never get out.
No magic applies, no physics,
there’s no masterwork waiting in the pit
for me to climb upon.

Not that, not that. I know
I’ve got to go there but I can’t
face the dark of the familiar places.
This is why I suck down smoke
knowing what it will do to me.
Some fears are so distant
they mask the closer terror.

When I sleep tonight
I’ll not bother to dream. The words
I won’t use steer me every night
to the singularity, and until
I can wrestle with them and make them
into a bridge instead of a ladder, something
I can cross and look down from, until then
every day will be more of the same:

not that, not that;

certainly not now,
surely not tonight
when the mere thought of breathing
steals my breath.