When you have the language illness
so bad that the metaphors even crowd out
your intellectualizations,
the best that can be done
is to put out your miseries
through your fingers, into words,
in an ecstasy of effervescence,
effluvia of erroneous a la carte,
one more entree, also, filled with the cheeses
of your own youthful veal.
Yes, childhood, the place where it all got caught.
It all as in expressions of feeling
that might otherwise have flowered
into expressions of feeling
in front of
other people.
Those avenues frustrated, flooded, barricaded,
the bastille of the heart felled again and again and again
by the revolutionary letters
written by someone you'll never meet
Author,
addressed to your eyes and mind and toes.
And here you are now, a cliche, an idiom, a traditional ritual saying,
saying things so that others
who also suffer
from your illness
may take your metaphors
and do by them a little will.
Roman Ryan 