There are clouds hanging around my head
And there is skin capturing my skull. I am boxed in. I can’t hear what you say when you speak.
This is not a problem when you have your hat with the earmuffs on and are momentarily deaf. When you have your hat on neither of us can hear.
Your hat has a pattern on it that looks like your skull
And so when you have it on you are like a deaf half-skeleton. This is when I feel the most need for lip-language, Morse code, when I want to drum my messages out on your skin. I say more when I lock my brain out of my skull and leave my body to its own devices.
You feel the bumps of earth trying to poke through the street
I know this because you had your earmuff hat on again this morning when you went walking outside
But even with your hearing gone, the street spoke to you, in bumps and ridges and edges and curbs and paint. You spoke its language back to it, feedback through
The soles of your feet.
You may be a little scraped up but you know the asphalt
Like a closed loop, like Saturn’s rings
Like the grooves of your favorite record.
I’ve seen you when you sleep, floating two inches above your covers. Your skin becomes yarn and it unravels, it waves, it ties itself around your ceiling fan.
Multi-colored yarn that twists and writhes and slides and knots itself until
The wavelength steadies and you are a solid telephone-line-stretch of yarn
Reaching straight across town.
I touch my end of the yarn and I whisper to the other end. Then I sit in the dark humid air.
I sit and I wait for the response.
This is when the clouds lift.
When the skin around my skull evaporates and I am left bare bones, unboxed.
When this happens
I hear the sound of Earth’s rotation
I hear your telephone-wire skin
I hear the closed loop
I hear Saturn’s rings
I hear the grooves of your favorite record
I hear the bumps in the asphalt.
I hear it all.
I am begging you to break your silence.