The Language of the Broken

I.
We speak in fragments,
Shattered syllables and fractured phrases,
Our tongues tracing the edges
Of wounds too deep to name.
In the spaces between breaths,
Where silence pools like mercury,
We learn to read the language
Written in scars and trembling hands.
II.
Listen—
There's poetry in the way
A coffee cup shakes against saucer,
When memories surface uninvited.
The clink of porcelain against porcelain,
A morse code of distress
Only the broken understand.
We recognize each other
In crowded rooms,
By the way our eyes
Skip across surfaces,
Never quite landing,
Like stones across troubled waters.
III.
Our alphabet is written
In sleepless nights and empty chairs,
In pill bottles lined up
Like silent sentinels,
In telephone calls that go unanswered,
In letters never sent.
We conjugate verbs
In past imperfect:
I was, I could have been,
I might have mattered.
IV.
Some of us speak
In missing pieces,
Carrying absences
Like phantom limbs—
The ghost-weight of what was lost
Still aching in the rain.
Others talk in circles,
Spiraling narratives
That never reach the center,
Because the truth is too sharp
To touch directly.
V.
We measure time
Not in hours or days,
But in the space between
Crisis and calm,
In the rhythm of anxiety's
Tap-tap-tapping fingers,
In the cycles of moon and mood,
Rising and falling like tides.
VI.
Our punctuation marks:
The sharp intake of breath
Before bad news,
The ellipsis of unfinished thoughts,
The exclamation points
Of midnight panic attacks,
The question marks
Curved like fishing hooks
In our throats.
VII.
We write our stories
On bathroom mirrors,
In steam and condensation,
Messages that fade
Before anyone else can read them.
Sometimes we carve them deeper,
Into skin and bone,
Where they can't be erased
So easily.
VIII.
There's a dialect of depression
Spoken fluently by millions,
Yet understood by few—
The heavy tongue of lethargy,
The slurred speech of hopelessness,
The muted mumble
Of medications masking pain.
IX.
Anxiety speaks in staccato,
Quick-fire thoughts like bullets,
Ricochet phrases
Bouncing off skull walls,
What-if-what-if-what-if
Until the words lose meaning,
Become pure sound and fury.
X.
PTSD whispers in flashbacks,
Speaking in present tense
About past horrors,
Blurring then and now
Until time becomes
A broken compass,
Spinning wildly between
Was and is and might-be.
XI.
We learn to translate
Between broken and whole,
To pass as fluent
In the language of the living.
We practice small talk
Like tourists in a foreign land,
Clutching phrasebooks
Of socially acceptable responses.
XII.
Some days our grammar fails us—
Emotions too complex
For simple subject-verb agreement.
How do you conjugate
The feeling of falling
When the ground has already
Disappeared?
XIII.
We develop new vocabularies:
Resilience becomes a mantra,
Survival, a second language,
Hope, a dialect we struggle
To remember but refuse to forget.
XIV.
In support groups and therapy rooms,
We piece together
A pidgin of recovery,
Trading words like currency:
Trigger, coping, breakthrough,
Processing, healing, relapse.
XV.
Our metaphors are borrowed
From war and weather:
Battles with demons,
Storms of emotion,
Floods of tears,
Desert years of drought.
We are both battlefield
And soldier,
Both ruins and architect
Of reconstruction.
XVI.
Some speak in the language
Of addiction—
A tongue that tastes
Of ashes and want,
Of promises made and broken
Like waves against rocks,
Endless cycles of rise and fall,
Craving and shame.
XVII.
Others know the dialect
Of grief—
A language of absences,
Of empty chairs at dinner tables,
Of phones that no longer ring,
Of clothes still hanging
In quiet closets,
Their colors fading
Like old photographs.
XVIII.
We learn to read body language
With scholar's precision:
The slope of shoulders
Beneath invisible weights,
The choreography of avoidance,
The geometry of pain
In hunched spines
And clenched fists.
XIX.
In hospital corridors,
We speak in numbers:
Blood pressure readings,
Medication dosages,
Days since last incident,
Scale of one to ten,
How bad is the pain?
As if suffering
Could be quantified,
As if healing
Could be graphed.
XX.
Sometimes we speak
In pure sound:
The keening of loss,
The white noise of panic,
The static of sleepless nights,
The heavy silence
Of depression's void.
XXI.
We develop secret signals:
A twice-tapped finger
Meaning I'm not okay,
A hand pressed flat
Against a sternum
Saying I can't breathe,
A slight head shake
Telegraphing get me out of here.
XXII.
Our poetry is written
In grocery lists never completed,
In unwashed coffee cups,
In unmade beds,
In calendar pages
Turned without marking
The passing days.
XXIII.
We speak in symbols:
Semicolon tattoos
On delicate wrists,
Green ribbons pinned
To lapels,
Rainbow flags raised
Like prayer flags,
Each color a story
Of survival.
XXIV.
There's a music
To our brokenness—
The rhythm of pacing feet,
The percussion of racing hearts,
The melody of tears
Falling in darkness,
The harmony of voices
Finally speaking truth.
XXV.
We are learning
A new language now:
The dialect of healing,
The grammar of growth,
The vocabulary of victory
Over voices that said
We'd never survive.
XXVI.
We speak in possibilities:
Maybe tomorrow,
Perhaps next time,
I'm trying,
I'm still here,
I'm not giving up.
XXVII.
Our stories are written
In scars that fade
But never vanish,
In strength found
In broken places,
In light that filters
Through cracks
We've stopped trying
To hide.
XXVIII.
Listen closely
To the language of the broken—
There's wisdom in these words,
Beauty in this brokenness,
Power in these pauses,
Grace in these fragments.
XXIX.
We are learning to speak
With whole hearts
Despite our breaks,
To sing with voices
That shake but persist,
To tell our stories
In all their messy truth.
XXX.
This is the language
Of the broken:
A tongue of survivors,
A dialect of warriors,
A grammar of hope
Written in the spaces
Between what was
And what could be.
XXXI.
We speak in futures now,
In possibilities and plans,
In dreams that dare to stretch
Beyond the boundaries
Of our brokenness.
XXXII.
Listen—
We are speaking still,
Our voices joining
In chorus,
A symphony of survival,
A testament to truth:
That broken doesn't mean
Beyond repair,
That healing doesn't mean
Forgetting,
That strength can be found
In the very places
Where we cracked.
XXXIII.
This is our language,
Our truth,
Our song—
Broken but breathing,
Scarred but surviving,
Speaking still
In tongues of fire
And voices of hope,
Until our words
Bridge the gap
Between broken
And whole,
Between lost
And found,
Between silence
And song.