When you reach for something, but can only touch with the barest of your fingertips.

When you try to speak, but the devil sews your lips together with the tightest grip.

Maybe instead it feels like someone grabbing you from behind and clamping their sweaty palms over your mouth.

Maybe it’s even God, telling you it isn’t the right time to speak.

How am I to know?  I am not wise.  

Is it possible God may not know the future?  

Again, how am I to know?

Is that why we have the pain in our guts and the hush over our lips,

even with the will to talk burning in our veins?

Maybe it’s the hope that better things will happen.

Or denial that others are selling our right to speak.

To speak our minds.

Now I feel anger, passionate in my blood.

God is shutting me up when I strain against the bars holding me back.

Metal, unbreakable, my grip on the bars is useless.

I must speak.  I must tear the thread, blow up the bars.  

What is my weapon of choice?  Scissors for thread?  Grenade for the bars?

I cannot decide.  

If I break free, what will God do?

Will he close my mind and command me to sleep by singing a lullaby?

Can God sing?

How am I to know?  

This feeling-what could it be?

It may be stupidity…

Maybe intelligence, for God knows all.

But who knows all?

The smartest being in the world cannot know your feelings, your thoughts.

I have to speak.  I cannot speak.

Denial.

That is all this could be.