Growling Wolves
I didn’t used to care much for words.
What good are words?
I was careless—they weren’t mine.
How we have fought over words.
the order of words.
Synchronically, they sit
independently,
democratic.
Diachronically,
waves began to form.
Meaning shifts,
wars rumble.
Syllables stacks,
meanings subterfuge.
Words cut.
Wound. Divide.
Separate.
Destroy.
Eliminate.
Abundance, blinded me,
Lost in chasms, languages intertwined.
Hokkien
Mandarin
English
Italian
French
or German.
Why is I love you, so hard to express?
or
I don’t want to see you anymore?
or rather,
I can’t.
It’s the words we don’t say.
The way we dance
around the hurt
—the deafening silence.
Silence reverberates.
A vacuum
that draws
in all other possibilities.
Plausible deniability.
The emptiness that
leaves a bottomless crater
infects an
unknowing passerby
in a different swarm.
That moment when you least suspect it, right before an overpass, on a corner of closing businesses and forgotten dreams—there of all places, you're suddenly flooded with tears.
Alien words for an alien body.
This is all we have.
Did you know
that wild wolves don’t bark?
A juvenile behavior
that does not go beyond infancy.
Only domesticated dogs,
poorly socialized,
retain this behavior.
Wild wolves, growl
amongst the initiated.
What do we growl?
Nice
quiet
words.
Let’s go home, he said, in the middle of dinner.
Everything that needs to be said has been said.
Those were the last words we exchanged.
These are the words I remember.
Useless words.