avalanche

The words have been stuck in my head for weeks now. They carom off the inside of my skull, scream through treetops raising birds and ripping up great rooster tails of leaves. They bound across rooftops and cityscapes, ping against shiny panes of glass, the windows of my soul, but they don't break through. They scream into mountaintops laden with a snowpack of emotions, threatening to start an avalanche, a tumbling solid wall of cold feeling, ripping through the valley and coming out my fingertips onto the keys. But the avalanche doesn't come. These words cannot illuminate, not with the soft glow of a candle nor the acrid flash of lightning. They cannot organize themselves, even as much as the wind can organize enough sharp left turns to make a dust devil. So I'm left with cold, dark, disorganized and gusty words, wreaking chaos in my head. Contained chaos, with no escape, no avalanche, no tornado, no explosive release. Maybe that's why my dreams for the past few days have been all about spittle-flying screaming fits of anger, or furious searches for items that maddeningly refuse to be found. I can't get the words to coalesce into so much as a cloud, and all I have to say is that I have nothing to say.