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poem
Finding what's trying to speak
A step into the words that return before the feeling fully does.
The words
Did you finally find the words to say
Something you forgot how to feel?
You did, didn't you?
Or maybe the words found you
Some inchoate sounds
Suggesting the shape
Of what you forgot
To even miss
This truancy of a feeling
A tune lost to time
Humming in the bygone
Where silence thunders
What emotion was it?
What part of you was it?
Amputated and exiled
In order to survive
A haunted history
Can you feel it again yet?
It’s phantom ache
Does it whisper to you?
Not in your ears
But in your belly
Or your heart
What sensation suggests
That this was once
Wholeness
But now just words
Words that feel like proxy
Stand-ins for something
More real than vacancy
Naming an incompleteness
Ready to be filled
By what you forgot
How to feel
What did you find
beneath them?