stricken

I want to only use the wrong words. I want to speak awkwardly and out of turn. I want this confusion to be confounded, all the archaic and unseemly palaver to rise from their cryptic slumber: zombies from a graveyard, Dracula from his tomb. Only the haggard and the hated. Only the forgotten and denied.

There is nothing gentle in a spoken tongue, less kindness left in the scratched out bones of speech. Language has all but forgotten any favor, life lost to salvation with these snips and hints. Letters fill the boxes of the puzzle built only to obfuscate and intrigue. Letters leave these plastic keys and disappear from all thought and feeling. The rough invective, the blunt and brutal blows. My only legacy, scattered into particles. Clipped and riven, sacrificed by fistfuls to the wind.

I am caught in the blistering of the unsteady labor, the wear of mistakes of experience and technique. There is no consolation left to stories, no thoughts skipping across the midnight pond of the mind. Fingers move without plan or pretense, tense flesh and smooth plastic. Dozens of fitful impacts, that gangster lean of bluff hyperbole striking that wall of impassive matter. Swift and impersonal, the touch of a contagion burning in the blood. Transmitting static shaped like a soul.