Only Listen

I want to speak beautifully,
for every word to count.
Not to contribute to the pollution of sound
in the aural canals,
or to roughly accost the sensitive, soft hairs of your ear.
Our senses are delicate but overwhelmed,
a false hardening.

It is not until sitting in silence, as a monastic,
that we empty our beings of the rubbish, the excess,
the oil, gloss, and sheen that are meant to mask
or beautify
what within us is raw and tender.
If we walk around open-hearted, the world is too much to handle,
creating intraversible chasms through the breaking,
which we frantically try to fill with the same world that hurt us
and harden ourselves to possible sorrows.

So I don't blame you for steeling yourself against its harshness,
as if wrapping one's throat before the biting cold.
I don't blame you for bristling at the thought of solitude,
fearing what lies beneath the present and familiar cacophony
that is jarring, but at least masks
the wails of the inner voice
screaming through the night.

Your breathing, warm, tender flesh has been rubbed pink and raw
by the grating, greedy sandpaper hands of media and capitalism,
yelling that what you have,
what you are is not enough.
So the world stings even more.
What is the balm for a being who has been marching,
burned, parched,
through the desert of sensation and dying for respite,
for sweet silence,
for the coolness of truth,
anointing the forehead with waking drops,
for a warm, gentle flame
rather than a blinding, neon screen.

A salve it is to embrace what is
rather than what the demon of ego
taunts you to believe,
convincing you that your worth resides
in all that is outside of yourself.
Eschew that which offends your sensitive soul,
and what seeks to drown out the wails of your inner voice,
screaming through the night,
"Listen, listen."