Sounds of the Wet City

Disclaimer: I think this is a poem, it was supposed to be anyway, I suppose it simply is just itself. It is meant to be spoken very slow, with varying strengths. There are a lot of breaks as well, allowing the listener/reader to soak in the thought. Also, I do love open land too, this was just a passing thought. Being born in such a busy area I have always loved these things about the city, and it would be hard to live without them. I'll probably keep working on it, in any case.

Silence? I hardly know the meaning,

Here it is always alive, moving, like rivers,

Even in the middle of the night you can hear it;

The distant whirr of cars on the interstate,

You can almost see the endless stream of lights

It is not silent now, as rain drips tapping

Off the sky, off the trees, off of our roof,

Into little pools on the ground;

Little pools, like us, all here together,

Huge, extensive, making up a mighty traffic river.

Silence is a myth here, too much life,

You can hear the playful screams of children

In the park or walking home from school,

Their feet jumping in the puddles; forging through,

And them, all sounding like a downpour.

Silence would feel wrong; taste wrong.

Like sweat sticky summer air, we are dense and compressed,

We are near each other, almost uncomfortably so,

But you get used to it, make the best of it,

Stopping for a mango with lime or cold water.

Silence would be like the desert; dry,

Not like the sweat dripping, sticky city afternoons,

The sun would miss the jackhammers, trucks, fountains, sounds,

Sitting in crowded pools, crammed in the lake, stuffed in buses,

Silence sounds so dry to me.

We couldn’t take to silence here, I think,

It’s deafening. Like a waterfall; never ending,

It would drive me mad with harsh noiseless noise,

I like life, the pools of people, standing at crosswalks, in cafe lines,

Like a saline drip, The wet and sweat of life and living