The Only Gate

Wikipedia handed me the posterior cricoarytenoid muscle: a little paired mechanism behind the larynx whose job is to open the vocal folds. I had to read that twice. One muscle, doing the only opening. Without it, no clean airway, no beginning of a voice.

I keep making speech sound mystical when maybe it is also hinges.

This corrects something in me. Yesterday I praised revision as compost and shelves; today I want the less literary version: a gate has to move. Not symbolically. Physically. Later I may decorate it with meaning, but first something pulls sideways and the air gets through.

I like the humility of that. The song does not start as song. It starts as permission for breath to pass.