Shut Up and Listen

I've spent my whole life choking on words, trying to combine characters and bend letters into a voice that was rarely audible. I sat in corners creating arsenals of stories to pass the time. I was rarely asked to speak, but when I was it was as if time had frozen and everyone's ghostly eyes burned into my thoughts. I had become a transparent phantom, gloomily passing by just to get through the day. Although I never spoke, in my head I spun words like Rumpelstiltskin spun gold. I spun thin lines of lyrics that could fill your mind with memories you never knew you had. I could have shot arrows of imagination into the vacant gap you've had since childhood. All you had to do was shut up and listen. Listen to the soft needle, fabricating an idea, a story. Listen to the waves crashing, whispering infinite fantasies that lived deeply within your memories.

He asked me if I knew. He asked me if I knew the truth better than the lie, but how could the truth not be the lie when the lie was told as half the truth? So I told him the truth. I never meant to feel that way, it just happened. But even with the courage of a lion, the wizard failed to give me a roaring voice that could be heard a mile away, and even if I went back down the yellow brick road, I'd only be spun back into the beginning, a place I barely knew. So I melted into a boiling pot of shame and heart ache. I let people mix me into a medley of chemicals, only reacting to the twisting tongues of broken blues. If only you knew... I'd say "shut up and listen. I love you." But even worlds turned into liquid silver, flowing into a hole between me and my thoughts. I was barely able to reach the surface, seeing blurring images of reality.

But I'll continue to bed reality the way you once did on the playground. I'll continue to fix cracks and erase scares along my worn out imagination just to keep it functioning long enough for me to create a new sun, too blinding for those chained inside a cave. I'm not the only one who grew up this way. There are those of us who live so close to the sun, we start to disappear into it. We are the under dogs who only want to be noticed long enough for people to see that we do exist. We run underground protests against those who lost their marching soldiers in the land of misfit toys. we rebel against the laws that tell us we can no longer imagine a different world other than the justified society we live in. We're dying mavericks, becoming extinct by the sharp voices stabbing our minds with the colorless reality. Shut up and listen. Listen to the pleading words from the childish souls that keep our imagination alive. Listen to the stories we tell, filling your mind with hope and vibrant colors. Join us in the war between reality and utopia and help us take back our brains that have been injected with a virus programmed to kill our younger selves. Tell the world, "Shut up and listen. I've got something to say."