Medium
As I wait for my grey hair to show, I acknowledge that I have not yet found my medium.
It's been a while since a paper or monitor was full, words in my head crisp, fresh and nonstop, pouring as I put them down and give them life—long form, short form, shortest forms like haikus, song,
Word
I also like sound, hearing or reading poetry in my head
Of voices that can caress or whip and slash
at least other people’s when they carry a tune, a pitch, a rhythm, a note
because I cannot.
I can only make sounds or noise on the keyboard or guitar. Ah.
Maybe it is my voice on, what? a joke in a barren tone giving no cues for laughter or pauses for applause.
Or when when my voice laughs, unhinged and seemingly forced
Or when it speaks nasty of others
Especially when it yells at my loves
before I have time to close my mouth and the sound leaves my body.
It deafens me so much so that it erases all meaning of the good words—the kindness, the patience that I let go despite my desperation to hold on to calm.
Ah, the sweet, dreadful silence when the noise leaves.
I have trudged on through five decades of the noise. I have changed.
My words no longer pour onto the screen even as my fingers and heart know that I should write something down to practice thinking, to bend reason or imagination.
I no longer want to hear others say the same things again and again, just different places or times yet the same thoughts, promises, pushes and pulls of an almost forgotten vision.
I listen to the noise once again in a familiar yet new place surrounded by people a generation or two younger. The hum in the room was familiar, the occasional laugh, old walls, the smell of unwashed carpet and stale breaths.
The only sound that has inspired me of late was a voice reading a children's story, saying good night to everything in the main character's room.
And after goodnight, we know that silence follows.
Maybe that is my medium.
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NU107 station ID from my youth goes something like: "If I could choose between blind or deaf, I think I’d rather be blind. For if I were to lose my hearing, that would be the end of me."
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