I have stood in corridors of choirs,
listened as they spun argentine from their throats,
watched voices vault like arches,
gilding air with something like illumination, like forbearance.
They open their mouths,
and the world remembers how to weep beautifully.
Whispers fold sorrow into lace,
draw a shroud over grief.
And when they sing, oh, when they sing…
even silence leans in to listen.
But I am unsung.
My voice, a rusted cringe, a door that sticks,
melody tripping over its own longing.
If I opened my mouth,
song would come in minor key,
thin and wandering, a bird
failing to find the wind.
I would tell of love,
but vowels would crack like old vinyl,
needle catching on forever.
I would tell of loss,
but it would not haunt,
only settle, only weigh,
rain falling in a room
where no one waits.
I would tell of joy,
but edges would fray like a canticle
half-remembered,
refrain dissolving before it reaches the heart.
So I listen.
Sit in awe as they pour voices into air,
a wine I will never taste.
Watch them bend sorrow to iridescence,
rise like incense,
turn pain into poetry.
And I wonder, perhaps song
does not come to me
because ears are needed as much as voices,
because someone must marvel at music
without trying to make it their own.
Or perhaps – song knows not to nest in ruin.
Perhaps song recoils from my throat,
a creature that knows better than to nest in ruin.
Perhaps it has seen what I carry,
what festers within my skull
what my tongue would spill if given melody.
Memories like rotting flesh,
stories black-veined and swollen with time,
bodies of days I have tried to bury,
but still they rise, stink of regret
seeping through the cracks.
How could one sing of that?
How stitch notes into a dirge
without tearing harmony apart?
To force music to bear such freight
would be a wound against sound itself,
a sacrilege of vapor and string.
It would taint what is set-apart,
make holy song common,
a cup passed not for joy
but for forgetting.
Those who heard would leave needing
a rinsing, a cleansing,
a new song to drown the old.
And so, my voice only speaks.
I do not sing.
I am not bard, not minstrel,
but prophet, priest and King,
set apart, not for beauty’s sake,
but for truth.
For truth does not weep in harmony,
does not iridescence like gleam on strings.
It carves, it rends, it speaks in raw bedrock.
It does not rise, it strikes.
And so, I speak.
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