I am afloat within a sea of sound;
Distinctive whine of engine and the roar
Of ventilation, and from down the ground
The rumble, rubber tires on asphalt, more
Atop it, stop announcements in a timbre
Specific to the driver, and the voices
Of others as around-between, they clamber-
Cacophony: in it my heart rejoices.
And yet the ears around me have been plugged,
With earbuds bringing content on command,
Ignoring their surroundings, as if drugged,
All focused on the objects in their hands.
I don’t resent their chosen isolation,
Their music stultifies imagination.
Hooray!! Yes there is a real world of sound, and sights and smells out there. Enjoy!
John Cage once asked, “Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?”
Yes!! Very nicely put. Technically speaking I particularly like this one because it includes sentences/phrases that span line breaks. Often poems match their phrasing to the lines, so that every line ends in a period or a comma. This one reads more like classic Shakespeare in that the sentences just keep going, regardless of where a line ends. Hard to do, because it means you have to think beyond the limits of one line’s syllable count.