shadows of echoes of memories of songs

Hi. I don't post much any more because I don't even know where to start and I don't know how anybody would hear it through all the noise.

Everything is deafening. The pressure of it on my ears is giving me the bends. Apparently not everybody has words clattering around in their heads all the time? Is that how they get things done? Does anybody still get things done?

I used to be able to pick words out of the noise and put them down on paper.

There used to be a poem here

-- a folder full of scraps of poems, in fact,
spilling from tin pencil-cases, lines
on blotting-paper edges, tightly packed
like dry gauze. I remember there were times

when writing made me cry, when even reading
my words made me cry, when every word
evoked a world, when every line was bleeding
into the next, when knowing how to hurt

and thread the pain into a woven whole
were skills not yet dismissed as obsolete.
Did I stop writing or did you stop reading?
Did you go deaf, did I become unheard?

Now years have passed that folders cannot hold.
I have not spread my poems beneath your feet.