The Words Are Waiting

Words hover at my fingertips
waiting to be released into the keyboard
so that sentences can spiral out onto
the screen – whole stories
fashioned out of the rhythmic tapping that
punctuates the silence – a voice
rendered in symbol and form – disembodied, yes,
but potent all the same.
So potent, that the fingers stutter,
and long pauses begin to fracture
the quick tempo already set by the eagerness of
those words – those words that hang
at the tip of a tongue
lying still in my mouth:
hemmed in with teeth:
imprisoned by jaw.
And then the pauses lengthen
and stretch out
to broad horizons of nothing
but a flatline –
the pulse arrested –
the beat does not, in fact, go on,
but is instead stilled.
And for a while,
for a long while,
the words stop coming –
they give up
on the prospect of release,
on the inevitability of their expression,
and instead they lie
fallow – a collection of words
piling up like sediment
in the base of my being, weighing my body
down deeper and deeper.
Oh to give them flight. Oh to stir the cauldron,
to raise them up from the deep, from the silent
spaces that divide thought from
thought, feeling from
feeling, word from
word. Yes, these words are hovering now –
they sit impatiently at the very
edges of my skin waiting to make the jump,
waiting to be seen and heard and made sense of,
waiting for meaning,
waiting for form,
waiting for me.