{"id":2517,"date":"2012-06-27T00:08:36","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T04:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=2517"},"modified":"2012-06-27T00:08:36","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T04:08:36","slug":"take-181","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2012\/06\/27\/take-181.html","title":{"rendered":"take 181"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tNothing 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.<\/p>\n

Sunset flows through a sticky Florida shotglass,
\na shoplifted tchotchke from my pre-liquor past.
\nThe whiskey thimble is adorned with
\nclipart palm trees,\u00a0a hot sun, beach towels, and the
\nhardened remains of Maker’s Mark.
\nI walk through shuttered graveyard with emptied glass,
\nusing it as a stethascope on the mausoleums of the
\nforgotten rich. I listen for pulses from marble crypts and
\nplastic flowers, mumbling sweet shot through my
\ndry throat with drowsy inconsequence.
\nI sweep up the weekday’s whiskey clashes,
\nassembling crushed and pointless childhoods with
\nsummary complaints of secrecy lingering in trinkets and
\nunder the beds of families’ phony histories stashed on
\ninvisible, infinite shelves.<\/p>\n

Night gobbled day and I stared through the tombs,
\nblinking at hovering silences in the great, infested sky.
\nFrowning hard and dumb at the pimpled horizon,
\nlistening for beautiful tyranny in miles of silent thunder.
\nI travel far without leaving the ground, or exiting the yard.
\nMy longest stares and strangest anxieties traveled grandest and
\nmost precocious through the lingering light of the dead.
\nMy trip home from the graveyard spanned alleys and driveways,
\nstained to their spine by organized darkness,
\nblubbering exotic filth of sewers and jazzless lovers.
\nI listen for slicing up the silence but darkness drowned.
\nLingering phrases spoken by strangers dangle in the vacuum,
\nresisting extinction with posthumous sex and political slander
\ntimed like victories of anarchist runners with too many legs.
\nI strand myself on this highway, absorbing the thicket of
\npompous thuds from vehicles overhead. The wet rumble
\nslithers to my ground like the tongues of first kisses.
\nNothing else in my life sounds like this. No other place.
\nI hear casinos of sugar, gold jungles, and God’s days
\nbegin and end as one. Five days become five days.
\nTen years become ten years. A million lies become one as we
\nlisten to the stories and lies told through powdery masks.<\/p>\n

There is nothing under the highway. Nothing for the sane and
\nnothing for the cradled. The emptiness raises my mind to
\nstrident measures, burning the void with holy ideas crowded by cruelty.
\nIt moves, instinctively conspires, gathers on top of time but
\nsimultaneously disintegrates. Yesterday grins at me like a
\nhollow tease, a voided transaction of experience once transcribed by
\nshotgun reporters but soon redacted from communal accounts of reality.
\nThrough the night-stained glass of whistling traffic I heard
\nunknown missiles seeking and circling but never bombing the targets.
\nI rest on my inflated sense of importance, inhaling vanities and
\nexhaling praise into clouds of humiliated dismay. The
\nexhalation itself is selfish exhaust, demanding attention.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phone-call","category-poems","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-EB","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}