If I Had A Voice Poem by Lee Gelis

If I had a voice then I would tell you,
Tell you that I loved you, that I cared,
That even I, the most silent of faces,
Knew of your deepest perils and dooms.
I would tell you about my adventures,
About my poetry and nightlife, about
The many evils that face me in daylight,
About morse code and Mencken,
The differences between a hatchet,
An axe, and a halberd, about the way
The birds fly when I walk near, and how
They do so when you've been sitting
For a very long time, I'd tell you about
What it's like getting older and watching
Others do the same thing around you,
Hiding their own skeletons and thinking
They were the first to do so, and least of all,
I would tell you about myself. For what a
Horrible thing it is for others to know of me.
No, it cannot be. I am not human, Not alike.
There is no character here for you. Go on,
move along, there's no one here anymore.
Just a being, without a voice, stuck thinking
of the metanarrative, unable to participate
in life's games for fear of gaining color.