Speak for Thyself!

I.

There in the drafty, darkened hall,
limbs and jaws and bones withal,
a row of bodies, nude as sin,
knee by hip, and jaw by chin.

Pale were they, and eyes asunken,
lips were puckered, and mouths were shrunken,
and there amid the mangy throng,
was one I knew, and knew him strong.

Yes, eyes; yes, ears; yes, flaxen hair;
the features that I knew were there.
But not the knowledge of his parts,
what gave him to me was his heart.

His heart, that is to say his whole,
his composite, his living soul,
but sight thereof led not to sigh
of cheer, for he - that ghoul - was I.

But I were me, then who were him?
And how had mind been stripped from limb?
Once one is rent in pieces two,
How can the wit be threaded through?

I have been told 'Speak for thyself!'
by those who witness not this gulf
between the wick that flicks and flits
and the combe that keeps the wits.

II.

A moaning and a twitching gave me start,
And shiftingly those figures broke apart.
Sight of self was lost amid the throng,
trespassed by their eerie, keening song.

Worse yet, their shrouded eyes began to peel,
the sight of all those sightless eyes unreal.
And worser still within that song of bone,
the voice I heard the loudest was my own.

Whence from, this voice that issued from my lips?
Who would to mind perform such censorship?
Oh, clamour and the blabbing of the horde!
I tried to think and could not, so I roared!

"Be silent, beasts; allow me to conjecture!"
and, in response to efforts at prefecture,
my own white face began to twist and gurn,
and spit and scream, and that was how I learned,

as all the fiends took up their cries anew,
my bruit was my articulation true,
that when I turned my thoughts toward my tongue,
resultant din was how my words were sung.

So what, my friends, is poet made to do,
when all their words are rendered cry and hue?
Should I above my brawl try to be heard,
or beauty that I shape be e'er deferred?