Notes About The Poem
There is also a song version with edited lyrics.
Sunsphere - The Dark Verses
my stereo system went silent.
the audiotronic streams of purpose,
of hope, of communion,
evaporated like breath on winter glass.
every time I reached for the knob,
every time I tried to listen again,
the static rose like a stormfront,
overpowering the station,
drowning the signal in its own grief.
the song was lost in refrain,
lost to the currents and undertows
of memory, of time,
of the soft, exposed places
where old wounds still pulse.
the unresolved.
the only tourniquet I had
was to leave it off,
to let the whole machine go dark,
to let the ache cool in its casing.
and silence became me—
became my tongue,
became the dimming of my outline.
I learned to live at the periphery,
to blend in with the other lost people,
camouflaged against a wall of limits,
each of us holding our breath
in the long corridor between
what hurt us
and what might save us.
the light of an equalizer was replaced
by fluorescent judgements,
the buzzing, sterile glare of hospital wards.
my gown flapping in the maelstrom
I was trying to escape,
a thin flag of a self unraveling.
they taught me that over-analysis
was a kind of salvation,
that if I drowned myself in the why-fors
I could outthink the sorrow of circumstance.
but all it did was build a labyrinth—
a world to live in,
a world to be lost in,
a world of isolation and woe
a world cut off from my source,
from the music that once held my descent
like a rope lowered into the dark.
without it,
the days became unscored,
the nights unlit,
and I wandered the corridors
with only the hum of machinery
to remind me I was still here.
the sunsphere dimmed,
and I dimmed with it.
but in the basement of my dreaming,
I found a derelict boombox—
a relic from the Dwyer fund,
Schumacher Christmas gifts
for the children of miners.
I had received it when I was five:
a white twin-deck sentinel
with an AM/FM heart,
unknowingly a gateway
to the rest of my life.
the guardian of forever.
sonic treasure.
I found it again in a box
labelled “yard sale,”
as if the past could be priced,
as if the sacred could be sold.
I lifted it to the shelf
and saw a tape still in the deck—
the kind you could record on,
the kind that once held
the first drafts of becoming.
no longer blank,
it carried something etched
into its magnetic ribbon,
a quiet testament to resurrection.
I pressed play.
what rose from the speakers
was a twilight speedball of song,
a cipher, a pulse,
a mind-beat sharp enough
to cut through the static
that had ruled me for years.
Mos Def became the gateway—
to the genre
to the grit,
to the grain,
to the part of myself
I thought I had buried
in the hospital hush.
I was never the same.
the breakbeat sounds,
the backbeat bumps,
filled the voids of a life
emptied of love.
it was the return of humanity—
not through the touch of skin,
but through the touch of soul,
of spirit,
of sanctity.
in those first bars,
I felt the pulse of something ancient,
something that remembered me
even when I had forgotten myself.
I knew I would survive.
I could flourish in the misery,
the flower forcing its way
through sidewalk concrete,
stretching toward any scrap of light
to avoid the stampede of feet.
I knew I could determine myself a future,
even if it was stitched together
from grit and grain and rhyme.
I knew I could hold on
to some kind of levy—
a breakbeat barrier
against the flood,
a rhythm strong enough
to keep me from going under.
hip hop became the rope,
the raft,
the revenant.
and I rose with it.
the sunsphere resumed its burn,
purples and yellows gleaming in the heavens,
and I was enlightened.
not with salvation,
but with teachings,
with knowledge,
with history and culture
braided into the very frequencies
that once eluded me.
the structure of those heavens
felt like something I belonged to—
a constellation of syllables,
a cathedral of cadence,
a lineage of voices
that made room for my own.
I learned how to unburden the speech,
to loosen the knots in my throat,
to resume the dialogue
with a world I had once abandoned.
I found new places
where the pain did not land as hard,
new chambers in the self
where rhythm softened the blow,
where language became a balm,
where the wound could breathe
without breaking open.
the sunsphere glowed,
and I glowed with it—
not restored,
but reconfigured,
a survivor learning
the architecture of light.
I left the ward behind in that moment,
unlabelled mix tape in my hands,
my ears still ringing with the treatment,
a phantom frequency I carried like a scar.
the corridor hummed behind me,
fluorescent judgement fading
with every step toward the door.
I didn’t know what waited outside,
but I knew what waited in the tape—
a pulse, a promise,
a resurrection encoded in magnetic ribbon.
for the first time in years,
the silence inside me cracked.
I knew I was saved—
not by doctrine,
not by diagnosis,
but by the return of sound,
by the return of self,
by the return of a world
that had not forgotten my name.
the sunsphere glowed again,
and I walked toward it
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