Draft from today's workshop

I write things as prose and then people call them poems, so I might as well split the difference and call this a prose poem. That way, I can have written something for poetry month.

The prompt was a poem called "Talking to Ourselves" by Philip Schultz.


* * * * * *

I have always talked to myself, always in both senses, as long as I can remember and continuously. I try to manage it in public, but earbuds are a problem. Hearing loss is a problem. Anything that makes me forget for a moment is a problem. It’s like being the only non-telepathic person in a city of psychics.

My ex’s landlady called it “externalized speech.” She said very young children do it when they’re learning – I forget what. Language, self-regulation.

When cell phones became universal, I was relieved because now everyone sounded like they were talking to themselves all the time, and I had a cover, however flimsy; I could hold up my phone or just my hand in a phone shape, and pretend I was speaking to someone else, even if the only thing I’d said was “I really want someone to love me,” fifteen times in different voices.

Sometimes I’m generating dialogue, for writing or for life. If I am anything, I am a dialogue, a continual inquiry into what I think I might mean.

Lately more people seem to sing along loudly to their headphones and not worry about who can hear. When they were children, somebody told them to sing, to express themselves, and not to care what other people thought. I wish they cared slightly more. Or maybe I just resent how much more self-regulating I’m doing than they are, how much harder I am working to be quiet.

In the hospital where my brother went as a baby to have his heart condition operated on, there was another child, one born with her heart on the outside of her body. She was tiny, but they operated and put her heart inside, and she lived.

I’m like that, but my mind is on the outside, in my mouth, in the air, streaming out and falling back into my own ears, so I can recognize it.

* * * * * *


{rf}