Let It Lie

There are things that I wish to say, 

rotting away in my throat, every day

that I do not let them utter their cries,

I can taste them slick down my throat, 

like an oil sticking and gripping like black mold 

floating in a bathtub of basin water already gone cold

and every word i say and add and collect 

like a museum curator, strikes its match 

at the end of my tongue, on the serrated edge of each word

and sets this bleak ocean on fire, laughing 

in its gloriously orange irony

so many words, too many damn feelings,

I wish I were an enchanted doll, 

pinned and plucked and perfect,

placed politely in a glass box for all of eternity, 

keep me innocent, small, untaught

like strings that don’t know how to knot,

because experience only teaches you how to make more fires,

with ways other than incomplete sentences and peppered matches,

so which agony is worse? 

to tell and kill? or to tell and die? 

either way, an ocean on fire, 

cannot put itself out or any others, 

so perhaps like the ground is to the dead,

just let the voiceless lie 

among the death rattles and airless sighs. 

-anna sluder