People love to talk.

This is the one,
And perhaps the only constant I have noted
In a world otherwise obsessed with change.

Words connect people,
Where distance presents its immobile barrier,
And scale its walls with an ‘all terrain’ guarantee.

People love to talk

With hopes that soaring songs
Will unfurl their gilded wings and fill out like sails
To catch the draft they need to cross an ocean.

Words are weapons too,
and more often are used as such;
Severing ties with the blades of sharp tongues
And marauding the silence like invasive weeds.

If the pen is mightier than the sword,
Then what of the gluttonous mouth
That spits poison arrows into the gaps between armor?

People love to talk

As though tidings of vindictive spite
Could heal wounds that have already become scars
And reattach dead limbs fallen to wars already lost.

Rubber bullets rattle between battered teeth,
Tasted with a connoisseur's palate
And delivered with only the finest of scabrous lips.

This world is the kind of place
Where people's eyes are like needles,
Stitching words into your back
So that they can read them out loud for you to hear.

People love to talk

And don us sweaters of borrowed words
That slump our shoulders for us,
While their itchy sleeves
Are only as comfortable as they should be.

Colorfully crocheted scarves that tighten like nooses
At the behest of waiting hands
That wrap themselves around the ends,
To tie frayed promises over raw fingertips,
So that we aren't the only ones who never forget it.

People love to talk

So that they might spin their intricate traps of thread
Amongst the branches of skeleton trees
To ensnare those who enter,
All the while condemning themselves
To the perpetual tangles
Which forever knot their fingers together.

Weaving webby wonders at a worthy cost
For but a fleeting rush of victory
That leaves with little more than a whisper to offer proof
For all the overrated tears it drew forth
From all those bottomless wells.

People love to talk

Watching smiles that wane like the moon
Until the night takes one too many bites
And is inevitably swallowed once more
From beyond its turned back,
As though it must hide its face from the sun in shame.

Through gazes flown at half mast,
Relentless lips curl against the profanity
That always seems to leak out somehow
Past the noxious clots
That surely must be asphyxiating them by now.

People love to talk

Though I find it hard to imagine why;
My own words trip and stumble
On their way out into the world,
But only ever a minute too late.

Perhaps I'm just soft-spoken by nature,
Or maybe it's just the stages that loom over crowds
Like a jagged cliff to a torrential sea of hollow eyes
That suddenly make me recall my fear of heights,
But their unfailing hands manage to strangle me every time.

People love to talk

And though pictures can tell a thousand words,
Words can paint a thousand pictures more;
Artists spin galleries of haunting expressions,
But the red dripping from their hands
Was bled from the ghastly canvases
That now sit silently under sheets,
Which line the corridor in rows.

A solemn testament to wade alongside the death toll,
A single string more of numbers to be braided in with the rest.

People love to talk

But what words can strike the guarded heart
Of a turned shoulder?
Of crossed arms?

What use are words
When they are no more than pierced accessories
Upon the ears of the deaf?

People love to talk

But I choose not to listen.