Magnificent Muted Muse

She doesn't make any sense, but they can still hear her. They can finally hear her.

She looked out at the audience,

her knees turning into liquid as she

parted her lips and spoke.

But instead of words placed one after another

elegantly,

her words fell over each other haphazardly,

stumbling awkwardly like a newborn Bambi,

and the feet in her shoes turned cold.

"I'm too old

for getting my hopes up," she thought.

"I should've known."

But to her surprise,

not a single person in the audience chuckled,

chortled or sneered.

Instead, a boy in the back row stood up

and cheered.

He clapped as if she gave an Emmy-nominated speech,

even though she felt her garbled words

sucked the air out the room like a leech.

But still, one by one,

more people stood and applauded her,

a true uproar of joy over the nonsensical.

She smiled,

and tears weld up at the tips of her eyes

and fell down.

Her heart burst with a warmth 

that would put the sun to shame.

She truly felt alive, so proud of herself,

even though she could barely say her own name.

Somehow, her soul reached them.

Maybe it was the way her eyes burned

when she stepped on the stage.

Somehow, the girl reached them

That was the first time she had spoken

in almost 5 years after the accident,

and she had never felt more alive.

Author's Note

This story is a projection of my anxious self. I suffer from PTSD from a childhood trauma, causing me to be riddled with fear, especially around large groups of people. GOD FORBID I have to stand in front of a large audience. If I did, I don't know if I'd be able to speak English.

But that's why I wrote this. I wanted to create a narrative where the world understood the heart of someone like me who finds it hard to form sentences without all of my words mixing together. Although I have never gone 5 years without talking, sometimes it feels like I've gone years without being heard. That's what I was thinking of when I wrote this poem.

Side note: the rhyme scheme is haphazard on purpose, this is supposed to be a spoken word poem, so it may read weird :)