The Tongue of thought licks clean the mind we call our own. An existential poetry about thoughts as intrusive.
Certain thoughts arrive without warning and consume the thinker. Are thoughts really divine, predatory, or erotic, self-created? That ambiguity is the venom that keeps us hooked.
Before a thought becomes a sentence, it is a presence. It is a visitor that has learned to copy our key.
This piece was inspired by one of those rare moments when I was so engrossed in my mind that I could clearly see the beginning of a thought forming in my mind, taking me away with it, and finally, when I let it go.
That step-by-step feeling was what I wanted to capture in ‘The Tongue of Thought’. Not thought as intellect but as something living. Something that knocks before it arrives and enters when permission is granted.
Most of us speak of thoughts as passive things. Fleeting clouds. Passing visitors. Harmless inner murmurs.
But some thoughts do not pass. They linger at the edge of the ear like cold breath in a dark room. Some thoughts do not appear. They touch. They grasp. They consume.
‘The Tongue of Thought
The tongue of thought is a presence unknown.
You feel it first through the tingle in your veins
and the uprooted bulbs on your arms.
A quiver, an ecstatic shiver,
that freezes time for just a moment.
You feel its cold, tingly
fingers grasp your shoulder.
Its long, salivating tongue,
announced by a cold gush of air,
right next to your ear.
You can’t move or do anything,
but fall into the trap
the trap that’s laid out for you
by you.
A bait for life.
The tongue swirls and drools,
enters your ear, and
all through your brain.
Reaches the arches and licks them clean.
There’s nowhere it can’t go,
nowhere it can’t reach.
You follow it, wanting to stop.
To control…
and it lets you…
just for a moment.
Right when you think you got it,
it flashes and zips past to the other side.
The Tongue of Thought never stops licking…
In the mystical traditions that pull me towards them from time to time, such as Sufism, Vedantic, Gnostic, and even the Occult, there is an insistence that the one who thinks is not the same as the one who watches the thinking. That behind the noise and chatter of the mind, there is a witness. Still. Untouched. Ever-observing. And the thoughts? They are weather. They are not you. Not for you to hold or to keep. They pass through, coloring you in their shades like an ever-evolving film.
This poem was born from something even more raw than this realization. It came from the experience of being inside a thought spiral, being consumed so totally that it didn’t feel like thinking at all. It felt like being swallowed.
I remember sitting with a thought that looped around my head all day. A constant background noise, it wouldn’t release me. As I sat down, wondering about the thought for the thousandth time that day, I gave up.
Instead of fighting it, feeding it my energy, my consciousness, I let it be. It was there, a body in my own imagination, floating outside of me, and its tentacles latched onto my head. One image led to another as those tentacles morphed into tongues. Wet, relentless, and hungry. It entered through my ear, straight to my mind. A sound, language, the very medium thought uses to exist, and licked me clean. Swirled me up in ways where I was drowning in it.
It wasn’t a dark image. It was an honest one. If that is what thought feels like or looks like… no wonder they are so consuming. And yet, ‘It’s a trap laid out for you/ by you.
There is something in us that is addicted to suffering. Something that lays out the bait, and calls it curiosity, calls it processing, revisiting, “caring about things”. And the tongue, its knock answered; enters. It takes us away in its slithery wet tentacles and lets us drown in our own making.
Control is the cruelest illusion the mind offers us. It lets us hold the leash just long enough for us to believe we are in power. Until something zips past us. Another thought. Another tentacle, about to suck you dry.
I don’t write this to despair. I write it because thinking of thought itself as an image is the beginning of something. Beginning of coherence, never control. We can never “control“. It is alignment, where you stop trying to overpower the sea, and instead learn to ride its waves, knowing you can drown, or swim, or do both.
The tongue never stops licking. It never will. But the arches it licks clean, they rebuild. The places it takes you to will take on another meaning the next time you visit. It is scary, and yet it is the only way you can find stillness within.
Because consciousness never truly stops touching the world. Perhaps thought itself is an endless mouth trying to taste existence through us. I don’t know, but I do feel the whoosh of air as the tongue has started rearing its head on this one.
“If you could picture the shape your thoughts take, what does it look like? Grab a color and set the page on fire with an image in your mind and translate it onto the page.”
External Links
- For an equally obsessive poetry experience, read ‘I Have A Wolf In Me’.
- To view my poetry book, Zephyr, on Amazon, click here.