“Stop chewing with your mouth open!” my brother says,
smacking lips trying to fake talking
to fill the absence of dinner conversation.
We’ve left it all for Sunday roast.
We need substance for stuffing
so we spend the week talking around sound
until it rolls home on Sunday.  

On Sunday
I end up stuck behind my bedroom door
wedged shut with newspaper columns
and small talk with the volume up.
Dad tells me to turn it down,
I tell him I can hear Star Wars through the floor
even the prologue drifting across the screen,
the sound of yellow creaking through my floorboards.
Yellow never looked so regal,
an off-brand gold for incomprehensive pencil cases
stretched out against the deep dark nothing,
the silence that we aspire to,
back when trade negotiations still hit
an interesting narrative note.
Or maybe they never did,
maybe that’s why we can’t get the news cycle right.

I got the whistling noise the landing light makes
stuck in my ear after a gig.
Dad told me to turn it down.
Too many men get tinnitus
from the sound of their own voice,
when their reaction to being turned down
is cranking the volume back up
and pulling the knob off,
but Dad I promise I didn’t say a word.
I learned from you.
I let the silence speak for me.

SILENCE can be insidious. This poem is an acknowledgement of stoic men. Men who at once fall silent, failing to process their emotions, whilecontributing so much to the racket which engulfs us. I wanted to examine the stoicism and anger inherent in our ideas of masculinity and explore how it harms us. In thinking on this, I wrote on the silence and the racket I remember from my home growing up.

Poetry on the Picket Line is a squad of like-minded poets putting themselves about to read their work on picket lines, in the spirit of solidarity. Invitations to rallies etc. welcome, contact facebook.com/pg/PicketLinePoets.

The new Poetry on the Picketline anthology is available at culturematters.org.uk.