Linguistic

Your first language after heartbeat:

Music. This foreign tongue, human,

is hard. It works slow and strange

in the mouth, bitter in truth and lies,

its grammar convoluted; the idioms

of face and body incomprehensible

to the non-native, but (carelessly

coached) you tried.

Until you stopped.

“Shut down,” they said: cold divorce.

Of course your heart never closed,

God knows you bled all unspoken

through chord and melody, but the

other, so rarely used, fell dissonant

at her feet.