Knowledge

There are many things I don’t know,

the ache of a lost language,

the secrets of the earth beneath my feet,

the silence in stars as they hang, uncountable,

a thousand years from the murmur of my life.

Why a body decides to give itself away,

how hands choose to stay or leave,

why a mouth, once made to drink from another,

goes dry, falls silent, swallows its own tongue.

But I know this:

most loves don’t die from a lack of feeling,

but from feeling too much, feeling sideways,

inward, in places one couldn’t reach

no matter how long they held on.

It is easy to say I love you,

but harder to speak in the soft tongue of understanding,

to look and see past the mirror we hold up to each other,

that thin, stubborn glass.

It shatters over and over.

We never seem to find the right words,

though we wear them like beads strung close to the skin,

a clumsy necklace we tug, rearrange,

even break in the search for some new form of beauty.

A heart can beat hard, it can want,

and still find itself unheard, left talking in dreams

And sometimes, when two voices ache out of tune,

they make only noise, a rough song that leaves

a chill in the mouth, and an empty room