You cannot take my voice
By A.J. Huffman

and make it your own.

You cannot confine me to lower case anonymity

because you prefer distance to empathy.

I am not the mass of interchangeable faces

that have bowed to your whim.

I am Queen in command of this verbal army.

I will not break into mirrored soldiers who kneel

to your preferred contortion of dialogue.

I am my own concentric circle of language,

a diatribe, dying with every tale I tell.

I feel a world of wounds you will never understand.

So forgive me for my lack

of desire to translate myself into vacuity.

A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida.  She has published 27 collections and chapbooks of poetry.  In addition, she has published her work in numerous national and international literary journals.