The Brutal Joys of Morning

When I destroy your city, I will create a wasteland. And this, then, it is a kind of beautiful, reaching action.
-- Daniel Pallas
Within That Awful Flare: Futility, Obsession & Art


Constance draws the curtains against the rising light from the east
against the noise from the playground.
Constance walks faster & faster toward the rising light from the playground,
toward the curtains of noise drawn east.

Constance turns toward the noise, the light,
faster & faster like injury.
Constance aches against her walking,
ashamed of walking and
Constance rising and rising toward
Constance.

Graphic Equalization

The moisture in this air bleeds sound, resonance heavy,
scarcely able to carry these simple street musics.

Tongue numb, unresponsive to the glimmer of speech,
I find myself listening to the way I would have made these noises.

I imagine my posture: a stiff 45 degrees off true to favor my good left ear,
standing back away from but also leaning toward the sounds sprung from voices.

I am facing a grid of photographs; I am pretending to nearly touch the surface of these images;
I am looking at her reflection faintly hovering in the glass; I am pretending not to eavesdrop.

A light voice, singing, is refined when passed through the filter of these plaster motel walls;
it will become the essence of her voice and language an essential song.

I guess I have been muttering aloud, a series of inflected rehearsals, trying things out, seeing how things sound.
I guess I've got something to say.

There was a time when my ears were much, much sharper than this,
when I could hear the spiky sonar of feeding, flying bats and the friction gravel made underfoot one hundred yards away.

I volunteer to blow up balloons for the big dance and into each I breathed a single word to later stare
at the pieces of my story woven into ropes and arches and carefully unlocked blossoms.