I Can Say Nothing Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I can say nothing that doesn’t die.
A word spoken quickly returns to the silenced void,
Unless it takes root, to nest behind her eyes to live awhile longer;
But this, sadly, it rarely if ever does—
And I have seen things I cannot explain,
Those elusive things unnamed and without definition
Foraging nervously in the backgrounds of her sleep—
And I have tried to hold her hand before to take her back
There amidst the shoots of spinning newness, to behold
With her the shared grandeurs of this new species,
But to exclaim of such things, to try and birth them
Into our world, is to cause death to come and feast upon them—
I have done such murder, as I pulled the silvery dreams
Out of my head and held them like delicate hatchlings in my cupped hands—
Look and see what you have made in me, my eyes seemed
To say to her, but as soon as I breathed my thoughts upon
Them, they came apart like spores taken back
To sleep in the hidden recesses of their natural environments, the inner seas,
And there to bud and bloom in the inexplicabilities of undiscovered sciences;

So, she could not understand, and took to liking the
Great expensive things our species so readily creates—
Those things, which like us, seem to last for a good long while
Even though they are already dead, the carcasses who stroll on in breathless motion;
They are the necromancer’s alchemies that comes easy into our world,
And because of this they are so cheap and they mean nothing at all to me—
But she couldn’t understand my abhorrence of their stylish normalcy,
And eventually she gave up and began to die that sad way
Women do into the men who have learned to walk so well, dressed
And dazzling like the proudly bejeweled peacocks of the marketplace.
So they were married in a dying world, holding hands and walking down
As pieces of them fall off they will never see nor miss,
And the greatest things in them will remain hidden forever, the borderless
Sea of efluvian delights, the billioned things this world never beholds
She walked away from as I said nothing,
Knowing that as soon as I spoke my words would fail upon her,
Like dying children from another world, they cannot breathe in our pallid atmospheres;
But they flourish inside me, spawning in the infinite gyre—
Even without her in me, their beauties spill over….