181

Fifteen hundred miles, tens of thousands
of words, and hour after hour of noise:
noise out of words, into words,
the nauseous noise of the words themselves.
We were artisans, sculptors, addicts, inhabitants,
patrons and subjects of the words, the noise,
the language and static and holy confluence
that drove us, daily, to this.

But nine hundred days of working it, breathing it,
suffering it, bleeding it, and glorying in its ubiquity
were not quite enough, not nearly enough
to taste every incarnation,
smooth every permutation,
impale ourselves on every twist and shaft
and irregularity
in it;

we had light-years and aeons of noisescape and wordstuff
to render and decipher, to work and consume, to process
in the spaces we’d carved for ourselves,
word by word, breath by breath,
the spaces we lived in and slept in and fucked in—
the places we never quite dared to call “home.”

Naming a thing gives it power,
and we never had power to give.

You. I have nothing to give you.
No artifact, no token, nothing salvaged or saved
from these years of nonsense and waste.
I’ve been buried to the neck
in high-tension hum, spent weeks wrist-deep
in the hiss of blank tapes
only to emerge, at last, empty-handed.

(Though it was never a matter of hands, hands tied and bound;
wings clipped or bent; legs broken,
splintered under truck-tires.
If there was breath in our lungs and a spark in our heads
we could move planets into place before breakfast.)

You. Your feet
are nailed to the floor and
your ears have gone deaf.
Your mouth is as empty as my hands.
There is no noise for you, no static, no sound,
no words Niagara-tumbling and shattering hard on our rocks.

Once in one hundred, I could put a break
in the static, a skip
in the noise;
my broken patois would twist something
soft and vital; there would be a turn, the sound of a shift—

you, once, were not immune. Twenty-nine months on,
the only noise here is the rush
of your blood; the only hiss is the rasp
of your breath. I open my mouth and sound falls,
lands, dies

in silence.