The Forced Smile I Bear

I know that what I want lurks between sentences. I know that it lurks there when the sentences don't and it begs me to pull the sentences from between my teeth so that I can know what I want and feel that I am attaining it. I am in constant fear of the youth that drives me and of how quickly it seems to be slipping away, dragging me along with it and I don't understand where these thoughts are coming from. How can I be so young and feel so stifled, so stiff? My bones crack and creak when I stretch and my hips shift when I sway. I see people and speak to them but the distance is an ever glowing orb between us and I'm always saying something that is so frequently misunderstood.

I feel that perhaps I don't understand things with such giddy excitement any longer and I miss those days when everything happened in unison with another. I know that I wake up now and all the things I might have thought, all the things I might have been forced to articulate, if I was alone, are lost to the feeling of flesh against my skin. I'm always slipping into the ever comforting embrace of skin on skin and I wish I could write my dreams down with someone holding me against his chest. I fear that the comfort of another with whom no art is made is an escapist sort of comfort.

I am not comfortable these days and I feel my life sliding around beneath me, around the forced smile I must always bear. This will not do. This distance. What will do is words. Words are the only thing that will do and they must be made really and entirely. I've lost so much time to this din beneath all the words I didn't say. It's time to make what's been said heard and to make what hasn't been said, art.