Chai's selling a pair of headphones... where all the world is a music video

Chai in a profile photo for the stage production Kunwari
UP, 2005

It's her 21st birthday and she's spending it inside that house.

Below is Chai's poem. She perpetually complains of half-baked creativity in words. Sus Chai, as you put it, lookie here:

I'm selling you a pair of headphones.

The wonderful world
in the headphones:
Dolby Digital Surround Sound in a theatre
where all the world is a music video.

I'm selling you a pair of headphones

Sedative
to the manic depressive
orchestra in the head
the placenta, the womb
water muffling you desperate screams
for whatever, at whatever
sound proofing against
revving engines at green light
the dirge in a woman's wail at someone's deathbed
of the mother, the boss, the teachers nagging
litanies from your organizer

I'm selling you a pair of headphones

heavily used
but good as new
satisfaction guaranteed
money back if you don't get what you see
with a free trial, of course.

I'm selling you a pair of headphones

MP3 player with it for free
jazz, hip-hop, R&B
lots of Rock
and a bit of me
that's crawled its way through the wires
like urine
through dialysis machine

I'm selling you a pair of headphones

such a waste to discard
this teddy bear i've had all my life
and i'm too scared to see garbage truck
devour them

I'm selling you a pair of headphones

for half the price.

Later, when i cross the street
i'll be standing on the yellow line without them

learn to rev at go
catch the words for the wailing woman
answer litanies
and erase the borders of the tv screen with the music video

and live beyond them.

i mean really die and live beyond them.
Heck, i'll give these headphones for free.

***
Drat.
The weather's not good back here in Cebu and I wonder if in their air-conditioned, camera-flooded "school," they also get the biting wind.
And I wonder, too, how she would die in a sudden heap once she knows what that Panky has been saying behind her back. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Too bad Panky, they're not showing it on primetime yet. (And if they do, I think publicity is on the way, and your 5-foot-protagonist will be way up the ladder than you).
Two times now. Two times of Chai's phobia. Talk about highschool days coming back towards unsuspecting Chai.

***
...like writing a crappy autobiography, or reading a book over and over again... and each time you get back to reading the first pages for the hundredth time, you totally forget how it ends.