Shouting With Hands

let me tell you
let me tell you
let me tell you
diving into words
deep into the phrases
what resides somewhere within
the true quiet morphemes
and thinking now of a man who communicates with his hands
told me a story once of a conference that he went to
sitting among hundreds of other men and women
watching a video of a mouth
repeatedly looping the letter “p”
and upon closing the eyes,
one would hear the letter “b” being spoken
where before there was an unvoiced bilabial plosive
there now was a voiced bilabial plosive
the sound in its own cosm,
becoming a bit more human,
less of a whisper or a breeze,
one step closer to a shout;

I know this man,
A voiced plosive
possibly a trill
an alveolar trill
A man of kindness
of conversation,
of words,
of culture,
of hats purchased from street vendors
shipped thousands of miles,
of white mochas,
with a bit of peppermint,
nonfat milk
steamed to a lower temperature,
of accents and caricatures,
of conversations and words
things that mean something,
of kind shared moments,
of peaceful phrases,
and each day in the low light
coffee shop,
He succeeded in bending time into a framework
of successive ideals.

one of the greatest plosives
fricatives
trills
aspirates,
that I have had the pleasure of knowing.