mirror number 4(on ontological paralysis)

what are we without the words to describe us?

you cannot listen to labored stutters and pretend that they are mercy

you cannot weep in silence in that incandescent room

the fans will creak precariously

the metal blades and the metal joints, all oxygen consumed

i spend each day with words looking back at me

in psychiatric mirror spaces, and written sound rantings

in the word, of the word, all separate but one

i look in the mirror and only language comes to form

and each drone, creak, or shift in the tile

a language of its own, and i reflect exactly

words, of subjects, of my stutterings

i look in that mirror, and see the cage i am

words look back to me, and mercy speaks in silence

i cannot weep, when fan blades do so for me

i cannot sit in silence, with the words before me

i will stutter my mercies, silence will stutter me

Reviews

[redd Brick Keshner]

This poem is devastating in its stillness, like being trapped in a room where the air itself echoes your most vulnerable thoughts back at you. It grapples with the existential ache of being defined (and confined) by language. The opening line, “what are we without the words to describe us?” is more than rhetorical; it’s a cry from the void of selfhood that language builds and unravels. It exudes an eerie intimacy in how the poem anthropomorphises the room: the fan, the tiles, the silence. Everything becomes an accomplice in the speaker's unraveling. “The fans will creak precariously” and “all oxygen consumed” evoke a kind of metaphysical suffocation where even breath becomes secondary to the tyranny of words. It is also a reflective a recursive loop: not the self, but language about the self. This is a brilliant evocation of ontological paralysis; where identity is choked by the very medium through which we try to understand it. And its final line: “silence will stutter me,” is a heart-stopper, that reframes stuttering not as a flaw, but as a defiance—a way of asserting presence even in the absence of fluent articulation. Mercy doesn't come in ease; it comes in the trembling. 🕊️🙏🏻