I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I love getting a little bit lost.

Today's poem is one you're going to lose yourself in for these few minutes,

and I'm eager for you to do that, so I'm going to get right to it.

Noise Canceling by Devin Walker, Figueroa.

To think I've gone to all this trouble just to lose my looks and mind too much that I am real only to myself, no matter. Even heaven goes to hell in time,

in time. Yet, in the revision of the future, I am still here, speaking my maund, un-minding my mouth, preaching to a mountain whose only sound

is my moan gliding down it, where water once carried on and on, amusing wasted gods and

ways we humans never could. Amass delight. Weigh your words

until they're free. Babble, bubble, treble, try. When the noise is finally gone, what will miss it? I unwind myself at my mother's feet,

touch a match to the hem of her emerald am, and make it an ember as another sound learns what sleep really is. She too adored ideas of continuance,

cultivated songs that helped her breathe, but now she is winded, now wounded, now new. And my math is bad, my science reduced to a sigh.

A child says, how dare you disturb the universe? How right you are, I say. All this singing about what's collapsing has grown older than I'll ever be.

No matter. No muttering over spilled blood and milk and tea. Though I dream of orchards, no one can discard. Though I stare toward stars,

starved of distances to defy, yes, the world minds me. Or I mind the world, the few places in it I've touched, its winds that

plague me as harp music might. And so I harp. You act like it's my fault. Youth went elsewhere.

I'm tired of watching my mouth.

My head feels like an egg.

No one warms with their waiting.

Even to sleep is humiliating, etc.

But when the grief is gone, what will miss me? No matter.

Everyone dares a door to close on splendor, I am told, as I extol the sun for beating me

...