I speak in tongues
Words that mean nothing
To anyone but myself
(And even then, I’m not so sure)
Fall from my mouth
Languid like honey
But not sweet, rather bitter
With the reality that
They mean nothing
Nothing to anyone but, maybe,
Myself
I speak in tongues
With a swollen tongue
That drools lazily and dabbles on
And on
And on
And on
About
Nothing
The universe turns its ears away from such nonsense
And yet this tongue still dribbles and drools
Talking to itself
I am privy to its conversation
I wish I was not
Ideas swim and swirl in the back of my throat
They are coherent there, they make sense
I’m sure they do
Then why is it
When they crawl to the tip of my tongue
They devolve and dissolve
Into bitter nothings?
I speak in tongues
And it is this speaking tongue
That chatters so freely, without restraint.
It is as if I
Am not the one
Who is truly
Speaking.
The poem fits into the communication/miscommunication theme, especially the miscommunication aspect of the theme, as it is laterally a poem about a tongue, which appears to talk of its own volition to the chagrin to all around it and the narrator of the poem, as the tongue appears to speak complete nonsense. No one really understands the tongue; even the narrator is not so sure of what it is truly talking about. And because of this the narrator laments their “sentient” tongue and the fact that though they try to produce coherent ideas, they always fall into nonsense because of their tongue.
