"On not being able to write"

The bittersweet ode of Keats'
autumn, the Kafkan labyrinth,
the fated, fractured, Ariel.
An awful
beauty in such agonising
mortality,
the destined winter lurking always
outside the margins,
in the spaces between the
words.

The spaces and
margins
smother
my words.

This is the moment:
creativity is
stillborn,
Sylvia turns on the gas,
the scream of the muse
ceases
to make any noise at all.

I no longer believe that
words
will keep my Caliban hidden.
You taught me language,
and my profit was not that I learned to curse,
but that I learned the protest of silence.

I have watched the
spaces
insinuate darkness.
I have built
the labyrinth of labyrinths,
containing horror in
the fragile glass of
a few phrases.
I have kept a world of
anguish in a
captivity of my own ill-constructed design,
and it is not enough.

A terrible beauty is born and borne
and there are no
words left.

What is the language of suffering?
I think I spoke it a long time ago,
when it seemed to carry the weight
of less horrible things.

When I carried the weight of less horrible things?
I forget.

I forget what it was like
before the silence stifled,
before it crept into my mind,
a duplicitous lover,
intimating peace.