Words
Posted on: July 9, 2013
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- 2 Comments
This is the original piece that I shared at The Stuttering Monologues at the 2013 NSA conference. Several people asked me if they could have a copy. I decided to share it here.
Words
Dance silently in my head
Aligned with the stars
Pleasing to the ear
Playing to an audience
Of one or many
Words
Never much thought
Just flowing like the river
Then river meets ocean
And the words swirl around
and waves crash on shore
Words
Start crashing
No longer just silent dancing
They come alive
Now heard
Audience leans in,
Listens closely
For waves crashing on shore
Come to life
They are rhythmic and lilting,
ebb and flow
Like our words
No need for perfect cadence
The waters tell us so
They rock and roll
From our tongues and land
Right where they should
And our listeners listen and wait
For the next wave
For waves and words and sounds
Are uniquely unique
No two sounds the same
And they dance an imperfect dance
Of words, our words, all words
And in that imperfection we find perfect
Perfect word dancers
As we’ve always been.
2 Responses to "Words"
July 23, 2013 at 10:04 PM
Transient dysfluency (temporary stuttering) is typically seen in 2- to 4-year-olds. They usually are very verbal and often advanced for their years. The dysfluency results from their talking abilities going faster than the language centers of their brain. It’s as if their brain can’t catch up to their motor mouth, so it slows things down by repeating sounds over and over (i.e. by stuttering).
Make Room For The Stuttering 
July 14, 2013 at 1:28 AM
If you woke up tomorrow with no stuttering, but occasionally you felt the urge to substitute a word here and there, wouldn’t that be a pretty good thing? I just don’t see substitution as a battle worth fighting all the time, unless you scramble your sentences totally when you do it. I once saw a transcript of President George H.W. Bush talking. There was hardly a single sentence that made any sense – he kept interrupting himself and going off on tangents. The transcript made him look like a total moron. The author of the article pointed out that it wasn’t fair to criticize him on a transcribed conversation – everyone does similar things when we talk. It’s just that most of us don’t have someone taking down our words and putting them on paper.