Far Away Poem by David Self

The world hums softly,
but its music does not reach me.
I watch lips move,
hands wave,
shadows cross the wall—
and still it feels like glass
between myself and everything.

The air is near,
yet distant,
like a shoreline I cannot step onto.
Even laughter,
bright as bells,
seems to echo from another country.

I drift,
a satellite circling the planet
I used to belong to,
my signals faint,
my orbit lonely.

And all I want
is for one voice
to break through static—
to remind me
that even far away
is still a kind of belonging.