Page 28 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. III #11

19
In Defence of Cliche
He talked in clichés
because he could at least talk when talking was hard.
He talked of his loss,
of his ‘angel’, his ‘sunshine’ ‘the light of his life’.
Clichés were his tongue
and his heart, his whole being in that wild moment.
The articulate
could choose their words carefully and make distinctions
but for him there were no suitable distinctions. Nothing was distinct
except the difference
between loss and its numbness which was not language.
So he spoke clichés
he had learned without learning, just as one learns pain
of which there’s plenty
that never does stop talking, rocking to and fro
as the voiceless do
and the child, being instinct with its wordlessness,
a silent cliché,
a gentleness of dead words in search of the dead.
GeoRGe SziRteS