Pop My Ears

We don’t talk a lot about ears, do we? They’re seen as simply the masses of flesh attached to the sides of newly Formed heads at birth Not seen in most respects as something of worth and yet I find myself thinking about my ears everyday And when someone asks me what one thing I can’t live without is, they might expect me to say Love, or books, or the safely enclosed nooks that I find in the corners of buildings And I half expect myself to say something along those lines before I have to pause and listen to a bell ring These organs that sit so comfortably under and behind my temples Are sensitive, And I’ve noticed that even when the sounds are gentle I must stop for a moment and go through that same motion I pop my ears It may seem strange, but I need the sounds to be clear Because I am nothing without the notes and pitches and music that I find being composed on intercity sidewalks And the ramblings and mumblings I notice in early morning re-runs of night talk Shows, where there are an awful lot of meatless roasts The kind that ears were made to live off of That I was made to live off of I can hear the secrets that are whispered through cardboard walls The last breaths of sentences that were never born at all The inflections of our own introspections that are numb on our tongues But louder than any shout in our minds If I stop talking now there might be the twinkle of a chime And though all of these observations seem basic There is one truth, I cannot fake it, That without these ears I would be more than deaf So I pop them from time to time to remind myself that these ears of mine Are not toys, are not tools, They are a means of survival, they are for more than eavesdropping and the spreading of libel They are the source of my understanding, My dreams and my outstanding Debts, regrets, excuses and respect For my elders and my littles Though the pages in these unused mathematics textbooks may become brittle And the fur on these coats may be faux and the grasp of a loved one may be nothing more than their own lie of security Sounds cannot lie Organs cannot cheat They’re made of involuntary muscles, see? Because no one can control them and so no one can pervert them and so they Are my preferred method of being alive Being alive for one man means to read and for the woman I passed on the sidewalk as the car blinkers clicked past it means to never let go of that song that saved her life when she was seventeen going on suicidal And for me It means To have My ears.