Earworms Again

I hear tiny sounds roar like catapults through chasms. I hear dust flakes turning as they fall through the air in my room and hit the floor with a bang and spin and crash into one another like bumper cars until they each finally settle into some tiny cavern in the cracking oak floor, while another dust storm, activated by the sneeze of a moth near the ceiling, already spins out of control, howling across the room’s stormy air.

I didn’t always hear things so closely. I was a fairly inattentive listener. That is to say, I was not constantly berated for being a poor listener. When the fickle finally realize what they just said, they’re happy you weren’t listening.

I wasn’t born with the huge ears now hanging from my now bald head, ears that sprout sprouts and fungi.

Did she say I was bald? I am not bald. My hair is as robust as the oak leaf, and as glossy green. I’m not sure what has turned it so green. My hair used to be yellow. Too much blue mixed in over the years.

Words hover at my ears like siege engines threatening the gates of paradise. She brings words to me. A single no in one ear splits my skull. A melodious perfumed yes rises and fills my head like a muddy wave. My asymmetrical hearing has me looking this way and that at the walls and the corners, wondering where these words are coming from.

Even as I write these words with a pencil in a notebook, I must wear earmuffs. Music? Surely you are up to some vile jest with that word. They will be here soon. We should prepare some snacks, cheese and bread, set out a couple of wines. Is there any of that red left from last night? It was a light and pleasant red. By the swallow you already forgot. Not like this morning’s coffee. What a dreadful burden coffee has become, so thick, sulfur. And what it does to the whole system, like eating a plate of butterflies with a spoon.

So, I’ve been at it again, this writing business. Well, not a proper business, of course (I hasten to add for the severe critics ready to jump their seat), this, in any case, not a profitable business. But what is profit? And what profits a man? Unless one considers the profits of emissions never (insert whatever adverb you’d like) to return.

If one could only write the final emit. Hit the send button one last time and be done with it. Send. How easy is that? Not like the return bar. Grab, pull, slide, and “ding!” That pecking order. Still, then there was at least the bottom of a page, and the roller, and the wad up, and the ball game with the trash can. How absurd now though these bottomless pages. Go on forever, you let them.

Delete not the same as emit. Delete and it was never there. Emit and there’s the refuse. Signs. Like reading tea leaves. She used to read my tea leaves. Trace my palm. Didn’t care where I came from, where I might be going. We went for walks, happily empty. Do you remember we used to run around barefoot?

No sound was too loud in those days. The world was acoustic, the breeze, the trees, the small waves asking for some beach to rest and relax.