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Click hereNot a sound not a whisper
Not a noise to be heard
The dead silence abounds
Where there should be none
This crushing hush strains
The ear and the mind alike
Is something wrong?
Something in the ear?
But no, just absent sound
Just hollowed out air
If this continues long
Any sound that comes
Will be deafening
I like the word play in this, particularly in the 2nd stanza. The brevity of the poem also makes the word play effective IMO. A longer poem would have turned the word play into a cliché.
"But," starting line 9 felt clunky to my ear.
I thought of the art and practice of meditation when I read this. I'm not sure if that was your intent, but if it was, I can better see the reason for the absence of periods at the end of the sentences as examples of how we manufacture symbols to help us better understand the sounds and meanings in speech, but to the one meditating such thoughts are to "flow" to their conclusion so that nothingness, ie, silence, returns. However, for that reason, I would have eliminated all punctuation, including capitalization. Because the piece is short, I think the reader could have intuited the inflection at the end of lines 6 & 7 without the question marks in the context of the other lines. Maybe not.
Good poem.