The Loan

To be an open book
and watched by the blind.

They look through the words
and call it seeing.
They spit an opinion
and call it listening.

What leaves the tongue
never arrives.
It is turned back,
forced into a smaller word,
and mailed to the mouth that risked it.

You try to speak
and the speech is returned to you
unopened.

One way is right.
The other is noise.
So the true sentences stay
where they were born —
stacked,
heavy enough to sink a ship,
and not one person
lifts a single word
off the pile.

Then they ask
why the room went quiet.

You went looking for love
and were handed a closed door.
Comfort withheld.
Kindness rationed.
Someone drinking
from the silence they made.

The worst of it:
love used as the lock.
You’re fine.
Said by the ones
who never let you finish.

You loaned the heart.
No one took the debt.

You thought it safe
to take the vest off.
The trigger was the reaching.
The shot was the knowing.
They had the map of you
and used it.

Kindness costs nothing
and still no one paid it.
Each door the same door.
Each face a turn away.

Present in the room.
Absent of the human.
A quieter hell
than anyone names.

You came to empty the heart
and were given an empty chamber.
A full clip spent
on the crime of asking.

We are screaming.
There is no voice left.
The den is made of words
and it eats the living.