Please, hear what I am not saying

Last updated on February 9, 2022

Don’t be fooled by me.
Don’t be fooled by the face I wear
for I wear a mask, a thousand masks,
masks that I’m afraid to take off,
and none of them is me.

Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me,
but don’t be fooled,
for God’s sake don’t be fooled.
I give you the impression that I’m secure,
that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without,
that confidence is my name and coolness my game,
that the water’s calm and I’m in command
and that I need no one,
but don’t believe me.
My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask,
ever-varying and ever-concealing.
Beneath lies no complacence.
Beneath lies confusion, and fear, and aloneness.
But I hide this. I don’t want anybody to know it.
I panic at the thought of my weakness exposed.
That’s why I frantically create a mask to hide behind,
a nonchalant sophisticated facade,
to help me pretend,
to shield me from the glance that knows.

But such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only hope,
and I know it.
That is, if it’s followed by acceptance,
if it’s followed by love.
It’s the only thing that can liberate me from myself,
from my own self-built prison walls,
from the barriers I so painstakingly erect.
It’s the only thing that will assure me
of what I can’t assure myself,
that I’m really worth something.
But I don’t tell you this. I don’t dare to, I’m afraid to.
I’m afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance,
will not be followed by love.
I’m afraid you’ll think less of me,
that you’ll laugh, and your laugh would kill me.
I’m afraid that deep-down I’m nothing
and that you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate pretending game,
with a facade of assurance without
and a trembling child within.
So begins the glittering but empty parade of masks,
and my life becomes a front.
I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk.
I tell you everything that’s really nothing,
and nothing of what’s everything,
of what’s crying within me.
So when I’m going through my routine
do not be fooled by what I’m saying.
Please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying,
what I’d like to be able to say,
what for survival I need to say,
but what I can’t say.

I don’t like hiding.
I don’t like playing superficial phony games.
I want to stop playing them.
I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me
but you’ve got to help me.
You’ve got to hold out your hand
even when that’s the last thing I seem to want.
Only you can wipe away from my eyes
the blank stare of the breathing dead.
Only you can call me into aliveness.
Each time you’re kind, and gentle, and encouraging,
each time you try to understand because you really care,
my heart begins to grow wings–
very small wings,
very feeble wings,
but wings!

With your power to touch me into feeling
you can breathe life into me.
I want you to know that.
I want you to know how important you are to me,
how you can be a creator–an honest-to-God creator–
of the person that is me
if you choose to.
You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble,
you alone can remove my mask,
you alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic,
from my lonely prison,
if you choose to.
Please choose to.

Do not pass me by.
It will not be easy for you.
A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls.
The nearer you approach to me the blinder I may strike back.
It’s irrational, but despite what the books say about man
often I am irrational.
I fight against the very thing I cry out for.
But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls
and in this lies my hope.
Please try to beat down those walls
with firm hands but with gentle hands
for a child is very sensitive.

Who am I, you may wonder?
I am someone you know very well.
For I am every man you meet
and I am every woman you meet.

“Please hear what I am not saying” by Charles C. Finn
September 1966

Journey of “Please Hear What I am not saying”

I (Charles C. Finn) had been studying to be a priest for about seven years at the time (1966 when I was 25) and was in my first year of teaching at a Jesuit high school in Chicago. The young priest who had been my own inspiration to give poetry a try several years earlier had opened me up to a French writer Charles Peguy whose fluid type of free verse appealed to me and, I see now in retrospect, clearly influenced the style of “Please Hear.”

I don’t remember sitting down to write a poem so much as following a prompting to jot down some reflections and realizing when it was finished that, hey, this is kind of a long poem that I could type up and share with some folks. Which I did. Not even a remote thought of publishing it, hence I didn’t even put my name on it. I had no inkling it would go beyond the people I was giving it to, and they knew it was mine.

I didn’t have anyone in particular in mind that I was writing to but realized by the end, as I put it in the final four lines, that it was really everyone I was writing to, because I sensed it was somehow everyone I was writing about. I don’t remember being in a particularly agitated or depressed state of mind either. I was just pondering a basic personal reality, long acquainted with, and intuiting in the process of writing it that it was a basic reality of others as well.

What surprised me was how quickly it flowed out of me, maybe in two days max, contrary to my normal grunt and grind efforts with far shorter poems. In retrospect I’m guessing it was precisely because my ego wasn’t straining to craft a poem that I was able, simply musing with pen and paper, to let something long percolating rise to the surface. I didn’t think much more about the poem until, beginning in 1969, it started coming back in a variety of ways. That’s when it started dawning on me that I had touched something within a lot of people who resonated deeply enough to want to pass it along.

I am in awe to have given birth to it (actually it’s more like serving as midwife) and to keep learning of its reach. An amazing number of websites around the world that are still using “Please Hear What I’m Not Saying” today attests that its journey is not over yet.