It’s hard to express yourself when you can’t speak. I am he who wonders what speech is. I am the voiceless scramble to understand what voice entails. It all dissipates into nothingness, but it’s all we have. These arbitrary clangs of alarms and trolley bells sound off from our mouths out of desperate necessity. We have to shout; we have to warn others of our presence. Here we are, here we are! We’re here, we’re right here, don’t you see us?! Nobody sees us because nobody hears us. Nobody hears us because we can’t speak. We can only sing at different volumes.

When I was a kid my mother asked me why I didn’t speak the way I should—about the things I should. I shook my head. That wasn’t speaking. She didn’t understand, but neither did I. Neither do I. How can you understand something no one can teach you and you can’t observe yourself? Some people look to God. That’s where I looked. Sometimes I still look, but the Tower of Babel has crumbled. I remember learning about it in church and thinking “well, that’s nice. That’s easy enough.” But nothing is nice, and it’s not easy.

Wordy again. Silent again.

The more you try to say, the less sense you make, but it’s impossible to make sense when you don’t know how to speak. All you know how to do is throw up and blow out that cigarette smoke and breathe and breathe and breathe out the stale air of your environment. I’ve been breathing for too long. I’m tired of breathing while I’m bleeding out of my eyes and mouth and ranting about nothing but not nothing since it’s impossible to define nothing because you can’t define differance and Derrida tried to do it and came closer than Saussure, who’s being a little bitch again, but it’s still completely without end and how can you have infinite freeplay in a finite system and how can you justify the lack of a center in a finite system and how can you define the system as finite when it’s clearly amorphous and it grows and stretches and squelches and oozes where it sees fit? You can’t. You can’t just invert the structuralist system and call it a day; you have to recognize that the so-called “finite” system is expanding and changing outward as well as inward.

I want to wrap tentacles of words around each of your billions of nerve endings and command you to feel. But how can I command without knowing how to speak? Maybe I can make you feel, but feel what? And why? We can’t describe it because we don’t know the words, and we can’t make the words because we don’t know how. I guess that’s the finite system. We can only change as far as our boundaries allow, whether those boundaries are expanding or not. How can you conduct a symphony while you’re still writing it?

I guess you can’t. When I was kid my mother. When I was. When I was a kid. When I. When. Once upon a time. It was a dark and stormy night. The alarm clock rang. When I was a kid. WhenIwasakid. Wh enI w asak id. I’m still a kid. I’ll always be a kid, even when I’m a corpse I’ll still be a kid. I’m always what I was but never what I will be until it’s what I am. Was it all meaningless? Was it all arbitrary? Maybe. Maybe when I was a kid. But not now. No, it c an ‘tb eno wth atI’v ego ne t oscho ol. Spinning spinning spinning spinning and no matter how hard you try you can’t b re akth ec ycl e.

Canghe the insedis all you wnat, but if you sltil hvae idaneticl outsieds niothng has cgnaehd. I tried to change the outside from within, but I don’t think I did it. My teachers tried, too, and they came closer than I, but they didn’t do it either. Is there any way to have the rain meet the ground in a way that makes the ground the rain and the rain the ground? I’ll be silent until there is.