THEM WHO ARE TOO CROWDED TO LISTEN

There is real pain in not having you
just as there is real pain in not having poetry.
—Spicer

Would they understand so simple a thing were it not born between two machines.
Or would they listen to your chest, hear the house that resides there, and be unable
to envision it furnished.
These wires connecting two distant voices are not the illness they might imagine.
I am writing this in lieu of a letter, to them who are too crowded to listen because
it is what I know to say.
If talk could afford to provide a cushion on which to sit, we could all be less
like narcissus and for a moment look away.
I sing the body acoustic so they may find what they will in these pockets of information
attached to a name, a face.
It’s ok. There is difficulty in what can’t be defined but when they arrive at a vision
the unstructured form that exists here could be made clear.
What should be silenced at the cost of language for fear of unknowing is the doubt
in language and its faculty.
Art is made of it, we listen to what the pictures say and we understand artifice
as a construct as this is a construct.
But what is said means everything for our words are not lightly thrown and when I say
I would do anything, I mean I would come to you as proof.
For now these machines are what keep us human. The grass we might walk on
is out front, the opal sky above, some magnolia trees providing shade.