Voices From Another Room (Poetry)

There are voices in my kitchen,
I can hear them from the hall,
they are debating something dry, for me uninvolving,
like trade deficits, money markets, city topics...
I barely listen but their drone is soothing —
this harmless delusion that I have company.

There are certain tunes that take me back,
conjure nostalgia, connect me to the past
with lyrics that cannot know their own power —
that randomness linking song with another time and place —
how sound can stir the senses, remind the heart
of things archived and so nearly forgotten.

Then there’s talk of travel — I experience a trip
I could never take any other way, share that scenery
mentally projected like snapshots, stunned by vivid panoramas
outlined and coloured in by words. Voices that somehow convey
more in their disembodied intimacy than visual images can —
a personal journey with no limits, no physical boundaries.

And all made possible by one small time machine
with simple dials, wavelengths I can visit like a casual
                                eavesdropper
sampling conversations, the programme guide a dense map
of days offering a choice of routes through radioland
with no option fixed forever, I slide along the airwaves,
seek confirmation from familiar voices, still in control.