Six Ways to Know You're Listening to Silence
After living under the flight route
Of airplanes for one decade,
You suddenly, hear them whisper—
Hard.
You start to question
Whether the noisy fireflies you see
Gliding by the corner of your window
Maybe are UFO’s this time.
A pair of blind, mis-
Placed birds
That sing in your backyard’s tree
Snap you out of night
And remind you of your life in the day.
A NASCAR vehicle hums
For a couple of seconds
Three streets over.
This gives it just enough time
To make a point and hide.
The freight train glides along
Buttered, metal chopsticks
Headed towards nowhere you’ll ever know.
Your breathing
That sounded hollow and soft
At first, gets sharper
And turns wheezy by the fourth exhale.
Your skin makes
A new and remarkable
Mixture of noise
Against the sheets and blankets.
It rustles with every move,
As if you were rolling around
In Christmas gift wrappings.
You think you’re lying still but
You remember you’re blinking
By the third pair of blinks
When a thunderous brush
Against your coarse pillow
Explodes into the night
Under a sapphire sky
And a half-eaten mint of a moon.
Next to silence, you realize
How lonesome it feels being awake.
Danced Round the Dreadful Thing in Fiendish Glee
There is a scent: the nauseating popcorn of fun,
That envelopes innocent noses.
The clowns dance a waltz with stiff smiles of oppression
In swirls amongst each other in a confusion of
Strawberry, blueberry, and banana ice cream colors.
Blankets of shiny squared rainbow confetti shower.
And the ring master stands on a black round step dictating, everyone.
The menace stands there absorbing glory behind his black,
Leathery moustache of power.
His crimson suit jacket with penguin tails
Conceals the times he kicked the water boys,
Violated the young dancers, lured Jacob into getting bit
By the toothless lion, and denied water to dying old man Jenkins.
Yet they dance round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee and magic.
The universe
Engulfs this rustic town,
In every sense of the word,
That sits in the concave
Land that birthed it.
It rests, surrounded
By the emerald pastures
Sleeping innocently
On the encircling nubby hills.
Spanish murmurs get lost
Amongst the violin winds
That smooth over the
TOWERless town
Into the shallow lakes beyond.
The skies are a vast
Clouded blue eye staring
Firmly below,
But at the end
A mango glow
Creeps to the horizon,
And the shuffling shoes
Rest their feet.
BIO: I am a Hispanic senior at Cal State Long Beach. I am majoring in English with a concentration in "Creative Writing." Since I started writing in high school I have not been able to stay away from a writing utensil. My favorite poetry is anything tied in with Imagism.
