Returning, your tongue must be hung on a coat hook,
your language each evening left skewered at the door,
as you roam your house in the dead night silence,
a black, blind time for communicating with no one,
not even gestures or facial expressions mimicked with
ancestral grunts and groans of those who’ve handed
down dead tongues, an inheritance helping utterly nothing.
If you live to leave again, the daily routine, headed out
the door to communicate, you must remember to retrieve
your vocabulary, but all rage and storm must stay behind,
the busy world not being a place able to withstand unleashing
of your pent up stream of epithets lashed out to burn it down,
no place for spouting stopped-up verbal fire fountains,
searing the outside with anger fermented in frustration
at the unspeakable anguish of the tongueless living alone.
Lanning Lee 