Language is put on trial here, and the speaker plays both prosecutor and defendant. Every line is built from words, yet the whole poem leans toward a moment when words are no longer needed. That tension drives it.
The construction is simple and quietly effective. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Short, uneven lines follow the pace of a mind working something out. The poem opens with a repeated pattern, "Words as thoughts," "Words as the sound of thoughts," "Words as inert, lifeless objects," each a new attempt at a definition, as if the speaker cannot settle on what a word is. Then the grammar changes. After the colon in "what I want to believe:" three "that" clauses arrive, separated by semicolons, and the sentence keeps postponing its ending. We wait, and the waiting is part of the effect, because the poem is circling something it hesitates to say outright.
The early imagery is physical and a little unsettling. Thoughts "drown / trying to escape the cave, / through the mouth." The mouth becomes a dark, wet cavity, and speech is a bad exit: the thought goes in alive and comes out as something else. The cave may recall Plato's famous allegory, though the poem doesn't say so, and here the cave is inside the body. Notice the movement of the definitions. Words begin as "the libidinal urge / of consciousness," something alive and driven by desire. By the third stanza they are "inert, lifeless objects," only a "conduit." The poem describes a loss of life between wanting to speak and having spoken.
Pronouns shape the poem too. For the first six lines nobody is present, only abstractions. The first "I" appears in "what I want to believe," and the phrase matters. The speaker does not claim that thought is feeling or that silence can speak. He or she wants to believe it. Those hopes sit on a hedge of vulnerability, and the odd phrase "the silence that speaks from beyond the symbol" keeps the paradox alive. "Symbol" is itself a word, so even the poem's escape route is paved with language. The ampersand in "thought is feeling, & feeling" is a small joke of the same kind, a symbol standing in for a word inside a poem doubting symbols.
Then "you" finally enters, and the abstraction becomes a gesture: "brushing my fingers along your cheek / down to your collarbone." The lines step across the page, indented further each time, so the eye travels downward as the hand does. The layout does what the words claim is possible, and the touch says something the earlier stanzas could not. The line "without ever needing to speak" is the most hopeful in the poem, and it is placed inside the longest, slowest movement.
The ending is not a conclusion but a trailing off. "You know what I'm trying to say…" is a statement, not a question, yet the ellipsis leaves room for doubt. It also echoes the epigraph, «What we cannot talk about…», which breaks off in the same way. The phrase sounds like a version of Wittgenstein's well-known remark that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. The poem does not credit that source, so this is my inference. Either way, the poem is bracketed by two unfinished sentences, and the reader is handed the job of completing both. Judging by the username attached to it, "wordsforghosts," the poem may also be about words that never reach a listener.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about its own limits. It doesn't pretend that language is useless, since it uses language to build its argument, and it doesn't claim that intimacy fully escapes it. It admits that this is a belief, something wanted rather than proven. By ending on the gap where speech stops, the poem gives its idea a shape, and a reader who has ever known someone well enough to be understood without a word will recognise what it leaves unsaid.