Words gather like stormclouds
behind my teeth,
eager to leap,
but stumble in the rush.

My tongue,
a contorionist in a narrow cage,
turns truth into tangled thread,
pulls silence from syllables.

I mean warmth-
say ash.
Mean stay-
say sky.

Sentences collapse mid-birth,
fractured by the weight of
too much thought,
too little air.

In the mirror,
I rehearse fluency
like a dance I never learned,
feet tripping over sound.

But still I speak,
through knots and static,
through the crooked paths
my mouth must take.

Because even twisted,
a voice
is a kind of freedom.