Hums and Howls of a Hush

I don’t know where to start anymore. I’ve started over so many times, taking courses and everyone telling me what I have to do, how I need to do it better, all the ideas I have that are not what they’re looking for, how you are all my voice of reason (huh? How can you be my voice of reason?).

I’m weary of trying to be right through your advice. When will I find the outlet, and the place where I can do what I do best (I thought that’s what you love about me—but now you act like I need your voice for reason—you’ve no idea how mad that makes me).

In the world and at home, all my livelong life, everyone’s telling me how to do it right. And trying to be the girl good, I’ve lived so much of my life all wrong. I can’t chance this danger anymore. It’s not safe for me to keep doing my life so wrong. I want to live and I want to sing the way I hear the song, the way I want to play the tunes, the way I know how to make the melodies—if I can still remember.

I’m so spread thin with all my stuff all over the place because I’ve given my rooms away to everyone else who needs a break from this world, so they can rejuvenate, repose, restore and rehear their own voice. Where can I go to get some peace of mind, to hear myself think, to remember how to take deep breaths, to listen to the bright and shining morning star seen in the eastern sky at dawn?

I wait for you my love to leave so that I can listen to what it was I was trying to say. I’m sorry, I really do love you but you think you know everything. But you know nearly nothing about my opus just as I do not know better than you how to do your job. But I know this and the problem is that you don’t believe that you don’t know more about what I am skilled at; how sorry and cliché your ideas are.

You listen to me just to try to figure a way to correct me, set me on the reasonable course, according to your own perceptions. I suppose I simply must stop trying to explain it to you. As it only invites reprimands, as if I am your child and not your lover.

Please leave my mind alone. Because, if I don’t get some silence soon, from your voice of reason resounding in my mind along with all the professors who want me to perform in a particular manner, I’m going to get lost for good. But you laugh when I tell you I don’t have enough time. That’s simply because you don’t understand how I write my songs.

Maybe cotton for the ears is all I really need.

You can clean your ears at the breakfast table and shoot balls of wax across the kitchen floor, you can pass gas onto my thighs as I snuggle behind you in the cold of night, you can lose ten thousand dollars in a day and you can forget to do the things you promised and I will but peep a sound. But I can’t comment on my own contemplation without hearing your voice of reason.

Perhaps I need a muzzle strapped onto my free expression.

There’s no doubt that I love you my dear, but can I love myself now? Can I just hum or howl a hush so you can’t hear the stillness amid this noise--in pregnant expectation of my melody?

You risk feeling unloved if I keep the calm close to my breast; why can’t you trust me to fill my own void with my own voice of reason? When I return to my own haunt to my own harmony, there will be a new hum or echo or swish or thud. Fear not, I am always with you--f you can just trust me—because I love you.