Painful longing is too powerful to express heart’s anguish in words

I can’t write poetry. I’ve tried to write it, but my efforts have always been terrible.

I can’t write music. I love music and I’m deeply moved by its magic — both words and lyrics — but I have no talent for writing songs.

I tried to write poetry and music when I was young. I even have a few samples of my attempts at verse. They’re awful but even through the awfulness of the bad art, I can feel the anguish of what I was trying to express when my pen wrote the words on paper.

For most of my life, I’ve felt a deep sense of longing. A sense of need. A panic. A fear. An emptiness that craved filling.

When I feel that — as I desperately do tonight — I feel an incredible urge to express it. My heart feels as though it’s going to explode in my chest. There’s so much I want to say — to express, to feel, to confess — and words aren’t ever enough.

I wish I could write poetry. I wish I could write songs. I wish I could sculpt or paint or do some sort of art which brings emotions into clear view in an abstract way.

But all I have are words. And they don’t seem to be enough.

Words seem so inadequate to express the longing of my heart. The anguish of unfulfilled desire.

Words seem so terribly inadequate — so sterile and unfeeling — to express the terror of being alone inside my skull, screaming for something which every fiber of me wants and needs and craves.

Great poetry expresses an idea without even saying what’s being said. Music stabs at the heart and makes the listener feel something powerful — in ways that are beyond my understanding.

I don’t have that luxury. I have only words. I have raging feelings longing to be expressed, but without the right reader, there is nothing worthwhile to say.

One doesn’t speak of love and longing and desire in the midst of a crowd — or even when one is alone — except out of the powerful need to get the feelings out before they destroy something inside. And without someone to hear, the words are useless and powerless.

I wish today that I could write music to express what I feel. I wish I could write great poetry to express love and beauty and longing. I wish I could produce such things and send them out into the world with a silent instruction to find the one who should hear them — to whisper such things to her heart.

But I just have words.

I have a powerful longing. I have the anguish of unfulfilled need. I have the pain of intense emotional pressure trying to get out of my heart before it crushes me.

I see her face. I feel her heart. I know she’s there. But my words are too weak and too ineffective to find her and pierce her heart.

Words are all I have tonight, but they’re not strong enough to make the music that could win the love for which I’ve longed ever since I knew the name by which to call it.