Nothing to be afraid of. Does this work? It’s been a year-long series of experimentations and now i find that the payphone I used today culls my calls with Nixonian silences. Very strange, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a payphone that inserts spans of silence into the call. This was recorded from one of the NYPL phone booths at 42nd Street.
Sunset flows through a sticky Florida shotglass,
a shoplifted tchotchke from my pre-liquor past.
The whiskey thimble is adorned with
clipart palm trees, a hot sun, beach towels, and the
hardened remains of Maker’s Mark.
I walk through shuttered graveyard with emptied glass,
using it as a stethascope on the mausoleums of the
forgotten rich. I listen for pulses from marble crypts and
plastic flowers, mumbling sweet shot through my
dry throat with drowsy inconsequence.
I sweep up the weekday’s whiskey clashes,
assembling crushed and pointless childhoods with
summary complaints of secrecy lingering in trinkets and
under the beds of families’ phony histories stashed on
invisible, infinite shelves.
Night gobbled day and I stared through the tombs,
blinking at hovering silences in the great, infested sky.
Frowning hard and dumb at the pimpled horizon,
listening for beautiful tyranny in miles of silent thunder.
I travel far without leaving the ground, or exiting the yard.
My longest stares and strangest anxieties traveled grandest and
most precocious through the lingering light of the dead.
My trip home from the graveyard spanned alleys and driveways,
stained to their spine by organized darkness,
blubbering exotic filth of sewers and jazzless lovers.
I listen for slicing up the silence but darkness drowned.
Lingering phrases spoken by strangers dangle in the vacuum,
resisting extinction with posthumous sex and political slander
timed like victories of anarchist runners with too many legs.
I strand myself on this highway, absorbing the thicket of
pompous thuds from vehicles overhead. The wet rumble
slithers to my ground like the tongues of first kisses.
Nothing else in my life sounds like this. No other place.
I hear casinos of sugar, gold jungles, and God’s days
begin and end as one. Five days become five days.
Ten years become ten years. A million lies become one as we
listen to the stories and lies told through powdery masks.
There is nothing under the highway. Nothing for the sane and
nothing for the cradled. The emptiness raises my mind to
strident measures, burning the void with holy ideas crowded by cruelty.
It moves, instinctively conspires, gathers on top of time but
simultaneously disintegrates. Yesterday grins at me like a
hollow tease, a voided transaction of experience once transcribed by
shotgun reporters but soon redacted from communal accounts of reality.
Through the night-stained glass of whistling traffic I heard
unknown missiles seeking and circling but never bombing the targets.
I rest on my inflated sense of importance, inhaling vanities and
exhaling praise into clouds of humiliated dismay. The
exhalation itself is selfish exhaust, demanding attention.
