**This poem is directly emulating David Perez's "Mach 1"**
I listen as the NASA employees
tell us about the speed of sound
and show us a video
of a jet travelling 1520 mph.
Mach 2.
Sound, they say, is slow.
Since then, I have not spoken much.
I am told it's because I am an introvert.
I once had a friend who used to cry
and sing and yell and laugh.
Now, her voice is but a whisper
after her sound waves couldn't travel fast
enough to save the man she saw
get hit by a van.
My father only shouts after the divorce,
mistaking volume for speed--
a common mistake of all
beginning musicians--
as if hearing his words
louder will make us obey faster:
And my mother, ordered by doctors,
swallows pill after pill
to quiet her mind.
An old friend once was sent away
to a Buddhist temple in Vietnam
to live a year of silence.
When he got back, he started
smoking marijuana every day,
glued to his seat and trapped
with his own thoughts, trying
to escape the gravity of Earth.
I am tired of silence
and the so-called peace it comes with.
I am tired of men with pills
and drugs and stories that
implore us not to speak against them.
I am at the center of the world,
listening for the uprising of humanity
but instead I am terrified to hear
the masses mumble words of apathy
and the powerful pitch me
empty promises of change.
Sometimes I get so scared,
I don't speak for days, instead writing it all down.
One time, I asked my mother,
"Mom, why don't you speak up for yourself?"
She told me it wasn't big deal.
When I got angry, she cried.
I held her and apologized.
"Sometimes
it's not worth
the trouble, Giselle."
