I had a Kathryn Simmonds poem up a few months ago, and here’s another one (lifted, as perhaps one in six of my TSPs are, from the Guardian.) I talk to myself, and always have. I talk to the unsharpened Dixon Ticonderoga pencils which are my talismen, and have been doing so since childhood. For this habit, I’ve been ridiculed from Carmel to Caernarfon. The advent of Bluetooth has helped reduce the impact of this behavior, as it so often seems that so many other folks are chatting to themselves.
Talking to Yourself
It starts with sounds of which you’re unaware:
the window, opening, gives a rusting sigh,
saying something, although there’s no one there.
The bath brims over while you ask the air
what’s the point? The air makes no reply.
It’s used to sounds of which you’re unaware.
Children see you chattering and stare,
and mothers with their trolleys wonder why
you’re whispering, although there’s no one there,
just artichokes, an avocado pear –
they cannot tell you how to live and die,
they’re lipless, though they may still be aware.
Inside the church the shadows lisp a prayer,
and votive candles clamber to the sky,
insisting something, although there’s no one there:
the priest has gone, the altar’s been stripped bare.
You’ve never prayed, but now you kneel and try:
it starts with sounds of which you’re unaware,
saying something, although there’s no one there.
Eerie!
I really appreciate your introducing us to poems like this. I would never have looked that author up in a milion years, but now I might. Poetry, like modern song lyrics, sometimes makes no blasted sense to me, and then something like this comes along and sneaks in thru the side door of the mind and stirs up echoes of thoughts or memories or whatever you didn’t even know you had.
For people going thru the same revelations as I, there’s another site run by some people name of Nielson Hayden {sp?]I believe, it is called “Making Light” [google it, I'm lazy] and sometimes their threads start to include some very nice poetry by the readers.
Talking to myself…hey, sometimes it’s the only intelligent conversation I have!
–It’s nielsenhayden.com , if you want to check them out.