The World Is Noisy; the Page Is Quiet
I stand on the paper.
It flexes under my bare feet—
fibrous, tension-dry, whispering,
warm where my weight presses,
cold where I have not yet stepped.
The page is already thinking.
It vibrates with unfinished sentences.
The room smells of lungs full of words,
of breath with nowhere to go,
of thoughts overheated and looping,
of madness turned invisible and sharp.
The air is crowded.
Every idea speaks at once.
I lift the letters one by one.
They have edges.
They scrape my palms.
Some are too heavy.
Some slide, slick as wet seeds,
refusing the places I try to press them into.
They argue while I hold them.
They change meaning mid-grip.
I fit them together where they do not belong.
They buckle.
They bruise the page.
The sentence resists being finished.
It wants to keep thinking.
I adjust
and readjust
and adjust
and readjust again—
the way a thought loops back on itself,
the way the mind cannot leave a corner alone.
Until my fingers ache,
until my jaw locks,
until the air thickens
with the sound of paper breathing.
Even the silence is busy.
I throw the letters across the room.
They strike the walls—
a sharp clatter,
a dull thud,
a rain of small impacts.
They echo inside my head before they land.
I run.
My feet slap the floor.
My lungs burn.
I gather them before they cool,
before they crawl back into silence.
Before they become another unfinished thought.
It is madness.
Utter madness.
Aw—utter madness—
the kind that won’t slow down,
the kind that multiplies,
so full that light collapses inward,
so bright it scorches itself into dark.
The mind overheats.
I do not interrupt.
Let the thinking continue.
Do not disturb me.
The words begin to work.
The letters fall into place—sometimes—
with a click I feel in my teeth,
a settling in the spine,
a sound like something finally locking.
Not silence—
alignment.
When they do,
I never want to read them again.
Reading would start the thinking over.
I move on.
Only forward.
Only the next
and the next.
The mind is already ahead of the page.
I know when it is correct—
my eyes flood without warning.
My chest cracks open.
Relief rushes in where pressure was.
The emotions rise—
not gently—
they build
and build
and build,
like standing on water
that should not hold me,
like dancing on the skin of the ocean
while it swells beneath my feet.
Thoughts holding thoughts.
It is manic magic.
When the page fills,
warm and crowded and humming,
I flee to the next.
The mind never empties.
Words lift into the air.
Letters flash past my face.
I snatch them mid-flight—
they sting my fingers,
buzz in my ears,
leave the flavor of thought
burnt raw in the mind.
They refuse to rest.
Do not hide from me.
I will find you.
There must be a fault line—
not for the words to fall through,
but for them to come up from.
A pressure seam in thought itself.
A split in the ground of the page.
A pressure beneath it.
The mind needs an opening.
Otherwise the voice could not be heard.
You are mine.
You are trapped in this too, with me.
Thought inside thought.
Word inside word.
And I know what to do with you.
Only I do.
Because you are in my room—
in the breath,
in the walls,
in the heat of my hands.
In the constant motion of thinking.
Forever.
Locked inside of me.
Written by Marguerite Grace
Copyright Protected
verse, possies, sonnets, and short stories 