In defence of the humanity of the listener in the Era of Monologue 🔊➡️🔊👂and a reminder to myself to pipe down and listen, for pity’s sake

By fabulous guest poet Emma Driver, effortlessly taking the position of 4th ever longette composer

“[Y]our form has been enacted. I have been embraced in its long, prescriptively syllabled arms”

Emma Driver

Welcome to the imparting of information down a one-way highway, on which
only motormouths are licensed to drive. Primed to communicate 🔊 (not to commune),
we assume the road is wild and unpeopled; forget the ears forced to hear our pitch,
the ears and eyes that are concrete nouns, not empty verges or vast voids that hunger

for the rush of being filled 🫗. Dams were happy as rivers, once! Did ears and eyes plead
for accretions, like riverbeds? Did they beg for this stuffing? Or did we shudder
at the thought that any thought, untold, was barely born until we forced it to feed
a waiting body? Dance, sing, speak, spit, lecture, tell in a torrent 🔊. We all do it

in some hour or other … um, where was I? Saying what? Will carry on regardless,
with less regard. With no regard, really – just a queasy need to expel ahead 🤮.
We’re heedless fools! (Headless, too.) And these tools we use to spew words are greasy, shardless:
clogged-up clauses, abstractions (💤), hedgings, the nouns as long as your mother’s memory

comma’d and dashed and wheezing, overworked and overeager and over-yeasted 🍞–
my god, now it’s a Nicolas Cage film! – words mushroom out from a bowl to the floor
and under the door to a room called That Sounds Plausible. (Snore 💤) There’s hope at least it
might bypass the room called Who Needs Verbs. (Trap that dough!) Rejoining the long talk highway

we veer off land into whitewater now. We’re rafting, tubing, the waterfall looms …
and over we go! 🌊 The fall shatters our bones in full active voice. Our clauses snap.
Abstractions turn to sky and water and rock. We tumble. We break. A silence blooms.

Humans, curious, paddle into view. The void is crowded; the ears have faces!
We regard more, not less, as they haul us up. Here are people, not unfilled spaces.

[Image of Japanese elevator sign by Syced, from Creative Commons. Poetry and audio by Emma Driver.]