How does one sing of their own self
when silence swallows the music
it seems everyone else can hear?

I say I could not carry a tune in a bucket
as a joke to friends, but I feel it in my pulse:
the quiet pounding until it is deafening.

So let me sing as the musician who has lost
the very hearing that taught them a tune,
but still feels the rhythm in the reverberations
that spread through the floor beneath them. 

I sing myself, not as Whitman did, 
and pour out all my daydreams onto the page:
darker things coming as melancholia
and those bright flashes of connection.

I sing myself, not as a daring soloist,
but as that quiet child in the back of a choir
mouths the words until they know no one listens,
and when they are alone, let everything pour out.

How does one sing of their own self
when silence swallows the music 
it seems everyone else can hear?

Not to the rooftops or public square,
but I sing defiant where it matters most:
in the echoing chambers of my heart.