We live in a world that treats the quiet ones like misfits, mutants, outcasts, freaks. Most people talk because they don’t have any idea what to say. Don’t disgrace the words by spilling them before they’ve impregnated you, been a heavy ridiculous burden inside the pulsing womb that is the mad torture of your own mind, grown into monsters with seven heads and screaming, until you are disturbed enough to feel them like thick vines tracking around your spine.
So often the world mistakes silence for ignorance, weakness, powerlessness, thoughtlessness, carelessness. But silence is how I write, how I grow rich, how I build my own bones and breed my own skin. The magic of the artist lies in the soundless, in the molten fluid pools of her willing and complete submission to the fullness of her every delicate experience.
How often to speak is to destroy the stimulus, to ruin the provocative overwhelm. The only hope I have of continuing to work is to remain alert, open to all of it. That everyday I may push further upon the unfolding of my own expanse.
There are infinite glorious worlds of pleasure and agony in my cup of silence.
And as they all misunderstand, I stay still and wait patiently like the wild hidden in the blood of the animal. I am quiet like an elegant death even as I watch you with the electricity of my entire being. I listen with my whole body as you speak. Like a thousand knives gutting the heavens are the beautiful invisible tremors I channel through me.
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~ Allison Marie Conway ~
My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.
Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.
All my deepest love, gratitude, and mad affection. x
