Forced Silence

I don’t have words of wisdom
Nor words of folly,
Neither words of sorrow
Nor words of Joy

I don’t have words of freedom
Nor words of redemption
Neither words to teach
Nor words to learn

My words do not heal
And neither inflict pain
They don’t enlighten
Or cloud the mind

I don’t speak in metaphors
I don’t speak in symbols
My words don’t personify
They cannot be used in comparison

My words are not part of a sentence
They have no subject or predicate
They obey no lexical rules
They’re alien to nouns and verbs

I don’t speak in prose
Neither are my words poetic
My words have no ideologies
Or theories to propound

They’re not words to be quoted
Nor words to borrow
I do not have words of courage
Or words to inspire

My words are not political
They are not part of a manifesto
Neither are they religious
They’re not words to preach

My words cannot be sang
They cannot be danced to
My words are not scientific
They cannot define a cyclotron

They haven’t been to outer space
They’re not on cyber space
They don’t need any space
They occupy no space

They cannot be broadcast on VHF, UHF,
Short Wave or Long Wave, AM or FM
They haven't contributed to
Or taken from civilization

My words never condemned the wars
The maiming, the raping… the killing
They didn’t participate in the holocaust
They’re alien to Gas Chambers

They know nothing about ethnic cleansing
The mindless bloodletting, or racial profiling
My words never spoke against slavery
They never sang Negro spirituals

They weren’t vocal for civil rights
They never shouted in protests
They never expressed a dream
It wasn’t by any means necessary

My words are not democratic
They’re not part of a majority rule
Neither are they autocratic
They serve no tyrannical whim

My words are not important
They haven’t been read in speeches
Discussed at meetings
Or screamed at rallies

They haven’t been gossiped, whispered,
Proclaimed or passed as law
They’ve not been used in conversation,
Interrogation, information or communication

My words cannot be spoken
My words cannot be written
They cannot be read
They cannot be counted

My words are not vocal
My words are without speech
I have no words to voice
I have no voice for words…

They will not listen anyway
They prefer the sound of their own voices
Well it doesn’t matter anyway…
Because I cannot speak, I am Dumb!

© Tyrone Terrence 1997

I See You

I don’t know what you see
When you look into my eyes
Neither the things you see
When you search my heart
I doubt if you’re what I see
When I look into yours
Wondering about your smile
And what it portends
I know the things I see
When I look in your eyes
Narrowing to see the look in mine
I am not what you see
When you look at me
Hoping to see what you want to see
You better understand this thing you see
When you look closely, and see me.

© Tyrone Terrence

One Thousand Me

I’m a man of a thousand parts
Each part is another person
Someone I have surely loved
Someone I have sorely hated
And yet another who passed
Like a ship in the night.
And the total of my being
Is the sum of all of them-
Added together and divided by,
Subtracted from one another,
And multiplied by one thousand.

© Tyrone Terrence
2009