Dear Major Ed Hops

For fear of sounding like a cat,
Grasping at air for the sake of pleasure,
I must desist.
But in the honor of my craft,
I must pursue the path unclear,
In the face of petty judgement.
“Where will you go?”
‘I hadn’t given it much thought, to be honest.
I didn’t plan on having a plan.
I showed up here just earlier,
Sort of a surprise to myself.
My feet are aching as though they’ve walked through two lifetimes,
But my mind is cloudy as a child’s.
I suppose I’ll go when I hear someone call me by my many names;
Whenever I feel the whispers on the wind,
Almost drowned out by the battle cries of motorcars and sirens.
Almost, but never quite.’
“How can you hear so softly?
I feel like my life is a vacation in a vacuum:
One of overabundance rather than absence.
There is always noise and things,
People and places,
But never any room for me to shape my own.
It’s suffocating and lonely and cramped all at once”
‘Maybe it’s because I was a whisperer in my younger days.
Perhaps I know how to sort through the filth.
I have learned how to hear past the noise,
And listen to what people mean and not say,
For the two rarely even meet.
Once you have ventured tot he world of whispers,
You learn some things.
Whispers, for example, to not belong to the Sun’s kingdom;
They are Luna’s children.
They slip through our lips when the blinding orb has fallen behind our spherical wall,
When doubt re-examines our mortaring job,
Crack, crack, cracking away.
The wind winds through the re-born faults in our foundations,
And projecting our whispers across the dark fields and skies.’
“I haven’t ever been a whisperer,
So this sounds like a fairy tale.
Which isn’t to say surreal.
Just a personal interpretation of objective corellatives.
When night would fall upon us,
Always suspected and always a surprise,
I would find myself locked in my room,
Looking out of my window.
Night is a time for dreams,
But not the kind that take you by force and whisk you away to some idealized playhouse.
The kind, rather, that map out your City of Truth,
Pushing down the dark alleyways,
Counting the windows on your skyscrapers.
The kind of dreams that let you stand on your Eiffel Tower,
And with an absorbing gaze,
Know who you are through your landscape.”
‘I’m afraid of knowing who I am.
I’m afraid that if I find a skin to fit into,
It won’t fit the next day,
Or even worse,
That it will always fit,
And I can’t outgrow it.”
‘Well, I’m afraid of whispers.
It reminds me of a chorus of nay-sayers,
Of anarchists within my walls,
Secretly plotting the downfall of my great City.”
‘Well, then. We’re just two sides of one pointless coin,
Aren’t we?’
“It certainly seems that way.”