Anoa has said:

Go forth and gather the bones of your dead,

Seek them at the bottom of the sea if you must —

Spare not the babes or the blind or the deaf,

Collect all that not yet turned to mere dust.

Our silences tear us from the inside. Your true self shrinks from the careless light, ever smaller, while your masks grow monstrous, ever more distorted; the waters beclouded can no longer mirror your true face. In dreams I run from room to room in search of a mirror to show me our face, but a raucous blur is all I can discern in each.

Screams emerge as owls’ screeches from the depths of our body; they disintegrate into ciphers which I cull and later attempt to translate into some sort of coherent language. The effort is vain; they are indecipherable, and the weight of going within to remember their meanings is too great. So you pass the hours stringing computer-code rosaries of 0s and 1s, that one day we may pray to a god not our own in the hour of our final death.

* * *

Anxiety of filling white page with black words grips throat and expels all air from lungs.

The nurturing void of the cosmic womb was plenum; this white void is desert that has never known an inch of rain. 

Fingers find fingers wring fingers writhe fingers cut papercuts machete cuts whiplash cuts running up down back. 

20,000 years ago Black peoples built cities in what is now the Sahara.

What else lies buried beneath the desert’s sands?

10,000 years ago what is now the Sahara (desert in an estranged man’s tongue) was forest and grasslands. 

What truths lie buried in the whiteness of this page?

Wrap yourself in a coat of words to deflect the perennial question, Who are you?

Your fingers cannot undo the clench of pallid angst on your body.