past midnight
A spoken word piece about young love and sound, originally written in 2010.
The room was dark. A soft hue of orange emanating from her night light illuminated the curve of her cheeks as she smiled in the still past-midnight silence. She pressed the phone against her face and let the sweetness of his voice spill into her mind.
He whispers: “Are you sleepy yet?”
The perfect pitch, she thought. His voice struck her as art. He was her singer. She was his audience. It was captivation without a single pause for contemplation if the bliss she was feeling was real. His voice, that was all it took. Every verse would reveal a page in his book, returning to a chorus that sang “darling I dedicate this one for us”. His voice was a pleasant melody of smooth jazz and pianos and violins easily easing into the background. It was then she knew that this wasn’t just infatuation.
Instead, it was love at first sound.
It was as if he stole his lyrics right from the core of her mind. Like he was educated to the highest degree, a PhD in the language her soul speaks. Her only response to these things: “How did you know so well? The way I feel and think.”
Their love snapped at similar tempos, never tapping too fast or grooving too slow, giving true romance a chance to learn and to grow. Together they created such tender harmony that one would wonder if what they were hearing was two separate beings, or rather, something that came together to form one body breathing.
And she swore that when she listened, she could hear his heartbeat-bass rhythm nervously bumpin’ through the speakers.
His voice. It only made her miss him.
By modern magic, his words took substance and shape, his lips willed them to exist and he blew them like kisses through electronic air. Then they touched her in the battered and bare places that others wouldn’t dare. They crawled through her skin, bound for the brain, connected his thoughts to hers to share his questions and sentiments through the sweetest of sentences.
For she needed to know...
He needed for her to know the depth of his heart before their lines would pull apart with her whisper: good night, sweet dreams, good bye.
The soul of his words transfigured into a tangible and undiluted solution that he transferred to her with such profound execution; her anesthetic — her eyes, body, and mind, at ease. Such peace only he could place her in. Simultaneously awake and asleep; erasing the boundary between reality and dream.
Smoldering in her chest lingered the definite air of affection; a warmth that caused a smile to slip like serenity across parted lips.
He was happiness.
Without question.
Her eyes closed. Her mind and heart open. Windows to her soul exposed. She chose.
“No, not sleepy yet.”
And their cherubic phone call conversation continued into the sweet stillness of past midnight.
I wrote this spoken word piece roughly ten years ago when I was maybe sixteen or seventeen. I think I shared it at a couple small open mics since then, but other than that, it’s mainly been collecting dust in my files. In the spirit of re-exploring myself as an artist, I thought it would be nice to give this piece a permanent home, as it still holds sentimental value for me as one of my first spoken word pieces.
When I wrote this poem, I was trying to capture sentiments from my adolescence when I was experiencing some of my first loves. Back in the 2008-ish times, it wasn’t common to have personal cell phones. So if I wanted to talk to my crush, I had to pick up the landline and speak in hush-hush tones in the dark while everyone in my home was asleep. These first romances also coincided with the time in my life when I first discovered and fell in love with underground hip hop, so there are elements of music woven throughout the poem as well.
While that’s the context of the piece when it was written, I think it’s still a fairly universal experience to stay up all night talking to someone that you love, trying to sleepily communicate warmth and romance and longing across distance, only through sound. When writing the piece, I was really interested in playing with the concept of how sound travels (whether it’s as music or a phone call) and transforms from thought to words to electricity, and eventually, into the emotions of the recipient on the other side of the speakers.