Flood the hood

[N.B. I originally started writing this intending for it to be precisely one line long. I got carried away. ~sigh~]

I’ll try to keep this post short,
But brief I’m mostly not;
Longwinded — that’s my true sort;
Of words I have a lot.

This meter is psychotic,
It’s driving me insane;
Conveyor belt robotic
Spewing words on every lane.

I’m like a fire hydrant
Run amuck, I flood the hood;
Benevolent word tyrant,
Fill the world with verb’age good.

What I fear most is silence,
Empty spaces, not a sound.
The lesson learned from science
Is that humans must resound!

Speak forth with participles past
And gerunds not a few!
The curtain’s down, your verbal cast
Has work cut out to do.

Just say the words, your voice be heard,
Or write them down — a verb! a noun!
A waterfall at beck and call,
And in your wake, a new wordquake!

I love your willingness to play with words! It is amazingly refreshing. However, I wish to nit-pick a little on the subject of the fourth stanza: silence can be beautiful.

I trust that you appreciate the white space between the words both in written language and spoken, and I know you must appreciate “rests” because of your fluency in music, but I still wanted to make the observation.

Many times I have spoken to fill the silence only to regret doing so just as soon. Carefully chosen words are sometimes sparse.

Very true! I love white space and quiet moments. And it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon that we’re afraid of silence — we feel like we have to fill it in when conversing, and if it goes on for more than a handful of seconds, we start to itch under the collar and search frantically for something — anything! — to stuff into the hole. I suspect not all cultures are like that, though.

At any rate, let me clarify that this poem isn’t 100% autobiographical, and that silence is not what I fear most. :)