While I Wasn't Listening

Gold cherry

By SoulFire77

Sun, 01 Feb 2026
  • 234 reads
8 comments
 

In the hush after a ping,
the breath between notifications,
the half-second before refresh—

nothing at all.

I remember quiet.
I remember reaching for it
the way you reach for a name
that was yours
and find

only the shape where it was.

Outside, rain splices the city's circuitry.
Engines exhale.
A cloud passes.

I watch the interruption
and feel something watching back—

something patient in the static,
something waiting in the gap,
what lives where signals

stop.

Mid-message, I pause.
Cursor blinking.
Heart                     buffering.
The words I meant to send
already dissolving—

I'm sorry I
I wanted to tell you
Before it's too late I

The phone trembles once.
Goes still.
Warmth fading under my palm.

I set it aside.
Close my eyes.
Reach for the silence I knew as a child—

the kitchen at 5 a.m.,
my mother's breath in the next room,
the hum of nothing happening,
the whole house holding still.

The kind that held you.
The kind that asked nothing.
The kind that was still there
when you came back.

My hand passes through.

The quiet is not waiting.
The quiet is leaving.
It has been leaving
for years—

each ping wearing the groove
a little deeper,
each notification
a door closing
in a house I can no longer

enter.

Now when the signals stop
I hear only the frequency
my own brain generates—
the phantom ring,
the ghost of the ping,
the hum that will not

stop.

Something breathes where silence was.

It has been waiting.

It is not silence.

It is what replaced it
while I wasn't listening.

Certificate 15
Poem
Inspiration Point (work that responds to our weekly writing cue)

Comments

Submitted by SoulFire77 on

I have been thinking about different ways to use spacing. What do you think about this example?

 

Submitted by HarryC on

Fabulous. So many great lines and images.

'Outside, rain splices the city's circuitry.'

'the hum of nothing happening,'

What lives where signals stop... something that so often gets lost now, or dies - like that silence in childhood.

I think the spacing is appropriate. The pause. 'Heart          buffering.' The line space with each 'stop' is right. Not so sure about 'enter'. I didn't feel the need for the pause there... but I may be wrong. Re-reading may change my mind on it.

One I'll return to.

 

Submitted by insertponceyfre... on

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Submitted by GlosKat on

All sorts of things slip down the cracks in time and/or space.  But I never thought about silence itself doing that, until I read  your poem. 

Personally I like the staccato delivery, I felt it was a good example of form echoing content.  What is going on in the poem is disjointed (I think) so a disjointed form emphasises that,.

 

Submitted by Mark Say on

I love the way this used the central device (literary and physical) of the phone to hunt at meanings.  Quite thought provoking and one for prodding at emotions.

 

Submitted by celticman on

caught me in the right space. 

 

Submitted by lenchenelf on

for its presentation, and as a poet you ask yourself, as many do, do you write for this for purely this time and audience or for truth of humanity throughout tech and age, evoke and critique what we are? Really like what you've done. 

Best

L

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Brilliant! Thank You :0) I love

The kind that held you.
The kind that asked nothing.
The kind that was still there
when you came back.

your suggestion that the sounds of the world we are creating are wearing it away