The microphone teaches endings

I've been on air at a Durban station since 2016 and the thing radio has taught me about writing is that sentences have an actual end. You cannot go on indefinitely. The listener's attention is a physical thing, a container with a fixed capacity, and every sentence either earns its space or it doesn't. I started writing poetry between songs, which sounds more elegant than it was. Mostly it was notes, fragments, words that felt like they were pointed at something without my knowing what. Then in 2021 I did a writing workshop through the Centre for Creative Arts at UKZN and someone looked at one of my pieces and said the compression was unusual and they meant it as a compliment. I decided to take it as one. The poems are about voice, literally. About what broadcasting trains you to suppress and what slips out anyway. There's a poem I wrote about a caller I spoke to on air in 2019 who said something that broke the format of the conversation we were supposed to be having, and the way the studio felt for the rest of that hour. I read it at a spoken word night at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre last year. People came up to me afterwards. That had not happened to me before.