Turn your cheek in the absence of feeling
you know, the way you do when you cannot
cope with the fact that you spend days stealing
now empty words that were but now are not:

Your speech is spent, there’re no words left to give
away, the sea is closer than you think –
bury your thoughts and drown your will to live
and return salty, unburdened, from the brink:

Hide your face, your tongue, the time has come to slip
into looser garments of earthliness
and flood your language in the planet’s hip:

Here stalactites torture with unending drip
and the taste of mineral emptiness
a heavy metal on your toxic lip.