Hearing Bad

Some noises are a pleasant thing to hear, but when I was given the topic of hearing my mind immediately jumped to a certain Wednesday evening, where I was getting the bus back from Blackpool. It had been raining, and I was enjoying a dry journey back home. Now naturally, when you’re driving in the rain the thing to do is to activate the windscreen wipers to get rid of the water. This is all fine, but the ones on the bus had this horrific screeching noise that made me flinch every few seconds.

It was a horrible sound to hear, and unfortunately I had forgotten my earphones so I sat there enduring a very subtle torture until I arrived at my destination. And now, whenever I’m in a car, a taxi or a bus, I always get conscious of the noise a windshield makes when it rains. Luckily, most cars aren’t like this, but I do apologise in advance if you happen to notice and shudder at the sound of the lagging squeak in the future.

 

From forks skidding across certain surfaces to nails on a blackboard, I wanted my poem to focus on the unpleasantness of such sounds, and make it look like an event instead of something insignificant that just irritates people many times over. I hope I did the topic justice.

 

 

 

Greetings

Sleeping on a surface still, dreaming

of catching chalk, of having its face

doodled on by playful mathematics.

The ships make their landing;

four or five, sometimes eight

all poised with malice.

Their keratin hulls slowly descend,

skidding the wall of black,

Stirring it to awakening.

Screeching, screaming

for hands to evacuate

into ears, too big to fit

they stick, until it stops speaking.

 

Thanks for reading, Dean Tsang.