A chicken's head lies in the dirt, and its beak keeps working. That one grim picture carries nearly all of Dave Bonta's "Speechless," a poem of only seven short lines. The speaker says they have lost the power of speech, and instead of explaining, the poem makes the reader watch something that cannot speak but still goes through the motions of it. The poem names no cause for the silence, whether a death, an argument or a piece of news. Judging by the text alone, that withholding is deliberate. The feeling arrives complete, and the reason stays out of view.
The poem is one sentence, and its construction is the first clever thing about it. It begins with "Like," so the comparison arrives before the thing being compared. The reader gets the beak, the dirt, the chopping block and the body in motion, and has to wait through all of it for the grammatical subject. That subject, "I," doesn't appear until the sixth line, and even then it is followed by a line break: "I have / no words." For a moment "I have" hangs alone, as if the speaker might still claim something, before the next line takes it away. The sentence is delayed in the same way the speaker is held back. It cannot reach its own point until the image has been fully shown.
The image is blunt. "Severed," "chopping block" and "dirt" are plain, physical words with hard consonants, and they leave no room for prettiness. The detail that matters most is that the beak is "opening & closing." A severed head has no lungs and no breath to push through it, so the mouth makes the shape of speech and produces nothing. That is a precise picture of being speechless, and it is more exact than simply being quiet. The speaker still has the urge and the mechanism to speak but has lost the connection that makes sound possible. The ampersand, a quick typographic shorthand, helps here. It joins the two actions into one repeating gesture, a mouth that keeps clapping shut and opening again.
The second half of the simile adds a bleaker twist. The head's "former companion," the body, "goes / through all the motions / of real life." Anyone who knows the old farmyard sight of a headless chicken still running will see what is meant, but the poem uses the idea sharply. The phrase "real life" is bitterly ironic, because the body's movement is only reflex, a pantomime of living. The poem leaves open which side the speaker belongs to. The speaker is clearly the beak, mouthing at the ground, but "real life" might refer to the ordinary world carrying on as normal, or to the speaker's own body functioning while the self is cut off from it. Both readings fit, and each makes ordinary life look like empty motion.
There is no rhyme, and the poem needs none. Its rhythm comes from the length of its lines. The lines are fairly long and loose until the ending, where "no words" is just two heavy syllables, a full stop with no air around it. The earlier lines roll forward, especially "goes / through all the motions," where the enjambment imitates the body's continued movement. Then the poem stops dead. The shape of the sentence follows the event it describes, with motion first and then sudden silence.
What makes the poem memorable is the paradox at its heart. It is made entirely of words, and it uses them to say that words have failed. It manages this by refusing to describe the feeling and giving an image of it instead. The tone mixes horror with something close to dark humor, since the comparison is almost absurdly gruesome, and that keeps the poem from sentimentality. The speaker does not ask for pity. Having shown the reader the beak in the dirt, the poem simply stops, and the silence after "no words" becomes part of its meaning.