Echophobia

Written for the Muse Ariadne Project.

The fear of being an echo.

To speak of echoes is
To speak of a fixed point
And things returning to it. The sound
Moves past, continuous, and
We only call it an echo
If it hits us again.
Its sun-faded
Softness, its tired dragging limbs,
Mark it newer,
Different,
Lesser,
Pretend.

The fear of losing what we can't and don't repeat.

You can kill an echo
With enough interference,
And we live in such a drowning wash
Of sound.
Bounced slant off a surface,
Without sightlines on the lips,
I can't make out more than the tone of a
Plea or a battle cry
Merging with the great grey buzz
Yet there are jagged peaks
That bely the false simplicity
Of the stories still retold.

The fear of the sound leaking through the walls.

I guess that's the thing about sound--
It can bounce at odd angles.
A wall can be
One giant crack
To a wild escaping whisper,
No matter how much water
We leave out
To draw it back.
Its ghost returns halfhearted.

Barreling on, it
Fuses with the barriers between,
Tests their mettle,
Then slips,
Barely-muffled,
Free.

The fear of the loud that came before

Things humming in me
Older than my memory
Started out there. I'm an answer
To a question I'll never know,
Because I coalesced
Bouncing off some distorted surface.
If I was more religious,
If I didn't look up past the trough,
It could seem like a convergence.

The fear of having nothing left to say.

Maybe every sound's an echo,
An earlier wave displaced or
Amplified.
No new sound. Nothing
In the triangulated gap
Where everyone else's shouts
Don't reach.
The valleys and the troughs line up
So conveniently, stand still in my stomach,
Making me
A little sick.