Our Eternal Sounds

--Adam Clay

What might all songs lean into?

 

               You scramble eggs one moment,

and in the next minute

 

               you're eating them

with dry toast and black coffee

 

               in silence.

 

                              On a day like any day,

your voice is not your own:

 

the grass clippings disrupt

 

a robin too large to fly

from worm to worm.

 

We don't know why we speak,

 

               but yet our voices

persist, even when void of substance—

                              like a dream you'd like

 

     to recall throughout the day,

 

but you don't or you can't

and after a week, it's gone forever.

 

Of course our voices

evolve years before our bodies—

 

our vocal cords vibrate like a heartbeat,

               senselessly. No explanation

needed.

 

Eventually all languages converge.

               Each thought falls

 

into all others. And what thought

               resists being built by words?

 

                              Perhaps fear placed us

               here in this room together:

 

a fear of fire at one point turned

into a fear of God. After that, a fear

 

of godlessness, a room

where a word before

 

               another word and another

 

word after the first

was all we had, all we could

imagine. Somehow

 

an image means

more than the object itself

but not because

 

               it's made of words. Most likely

it's because the act of creation

 

sets the mind down like a bird

               in a field

 

where the speed of the invasive cannot exist.