maybe english isn’t really my native tongue

i speaks bits of other languages, a mutt of linguistical gymnastics, not enough to be fluent but just the right amount to offend

perhaps i haven’t found my true language in the ocean of words that lazily laps the beaches of my mind

what if the doctors implanted a translation device onto my vocal chords as an infant

purple and screaming and covered in the remnants of fat and hair from my nine month sabbatical in a womb with a view

pulled screaming into a world of light and pain

grafted into my newborn throat in an effort to prevent my words from being truly heard

how do I know i think in the same language i speak if the words i speak are constantly ignored by the ears i so desperately plead them to

i have no memory of being born

what if i was hatched or fell from space in a cocoon manufactured in a lab or risen from the watery depths

i could have fallen from heaven or been banished from hell, all memories erased as part of my eternal punishment

my words translated and misappropriated from another race, of giants or dwarves

my mind branded and truncated so the reality of who or what i am is kept hidden

the people around me always sensing something is off and maintaining a safe distance

are my birth parents out there somewhere looking for any trace of the prodigal son prophesized to lead them back home

the actors paid to keep the facts fantasy and the fantasy factual, the family that never accepted me as one of the tribe

a nomad driven from home to foreign lands, the frozen tundra that once crackled beneath my feet traded for dry cracked earth and the howling winds for pummeling heat

my constant search for a mating of souls doomed to failure because we speak in different words

she walks the moons of saturn while i wile away the days in texas, unknowing, uncaring, ignorant to each other’s existence, separated by the vacuum of space

unhappily settling for brief bouts of tainted contentment as the waves of sorrow crash against us

my unintelligible cries, my illegible handwriting, indistinct and indecipherable admist the confused impulses from brain to throat to clumsy tongue unable to form the consonants and vowels in a frequency oh so frequently misheard and misaligned by too human fraility

if i think hard enough can these muddy thoughts travel beyond the veil and pierce the heart of darkness and free mine own heart from the agonizing throes of inconsequence

can you help me to speak in a way the world can understand

to at last spill my thoughts onto the canvas and not worry they will be misinterpreted

this tongue sharpened and lashing like a sword in a child’s hands, tempered by distemper, not yet quenched in the sublime oils of purpose

gibberish and irreconcilable indifference spewed like comets of idioms and poorly worded explosions

a fissure, a crack, a two ton wrecking ball of unbridled passion and unmitigated failure

ceaseless

meaningless

cast off words and inelegant phrases spit like seeds into the rubbish bin of rationality

lost in translation, the transitive properties of love in a loveless time

stuttering and tripping over my own pent up fury of volcanic blinded insight

broken words falling from jagged teeth and swollen lips, lacerating, inebriating, defenestrating, debilitating odes of secular insecurities and prayers to empty skies and barren lands

untrodden and unavailable availings

muttered oaths of tangerine kisses and feeling your heartbeat against my trembling mouth

wanting so badly to be a double negative and thus proving my postivity

unable to speak with my foreign tongue glued to the roof of my bloody mouth

another underpaid and underprivileged translator walks away from the job of unhealthy discourse and discarded verbal attrocity

lost in mistranslation no rosetta stone in sight