Graphic Equalization

The moisture in this air bleeds sound, resonance heavy,
scarcely able to carry these simple street musics.

Tongue numb, unresponsive to the glimmer of speech,
I find myself listening to the way I would have made these noises.

I imagine my posture: a stiff 45 degrees off true to favor my good left ear,
standing back away from but also leaning toward the sounds sprung from voices.

I am facing a grid of photographs; I am pretending to nearly touch the surface of these images;
I am looking at her reflection faintly hovering in the glass; I am pretending not to eavesdrop.

A light voice, singing, is refined when passed through the filter of these plaster motel walls;
it will become the essence of her voice and language an essential song.

I guess I have been muttering aloud, a series of inflected rehearsals, trying things out, seeing how things sound.
I guess I've got something to say.

There was a time when my ears were much, much sharper than this,
when I could hear the spiky sonar of feeding, flying bats and the friction gravel made underfoot one hundred yards away.

I volunteer to blow up balloons for the big dance and into each I breathed a single word to later stare
at the pieces of my story woven into ropes and arches and carefully unlocked blossoms.