Let yourself in—
use any key that fits.
Be kind to the parrot in the mirror
who doesn’t know what he’s saying,
there in that cage that looks
so much like your face.
No one is on this, not even you.
Call the numbers you find
on certain benches in the park
& leave messages consisting of
precisely timed moments of silence.
Words can’t be trusted.
Be sure to forget your dreams
immediately upon waking
& remove all traces of any nocturnal emissions.
If sleep apnea develops,
treat with a didgeridoo
to reboot your breathing:
go deeper.
Let yourself down
with knotted bedsheets, gingerly,
through what used to pass for moonlight
in the age of aluminum.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Bridge to Nowhere
- Natural Faculties
- (Re-)Claiming the Body
- Ceiling snakes
- Train Song
- Surgery of the Absurd
- Notes toward a taxonomy of sadness
- Weeding
- Blanket
- Forecast
- Curriculum Vitae
- Lullaby
- Fist
- On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
- Gibbous
- Song of the Millipede
- Autumn haibun
- Bread & Water
- Jersey Shore
- Initiation
- October dusk
- Goodnight moon
- Antidote
- The Starlings
- To the Child I Never Had
- Ambitions
- Learn Harmonica Today
- Two-line haiku
- Sleeper Cell
- Unchurched
- Turnips
- Homiletics
- Magic Carpet
- When the Wind is Southerly
- Connection
- Ground Beetle
- Étude for the World’s Smallest Violin
Love these lines best, Dave:
“Let yourself down
with knotted bedsheets, gingerly,
through what used to pass for moonlight
in the age of aluminum.”
Thanks. Sometimes it’s fun to go weird at the end! Inspiration came from one of my favorite objects, an aluminum countertop coffee tin from the 1950s.
I’m impressed you could write this so quickly. I’m assuming it was quick because of the didgeridoo line.
Yeah, this was a half-hour job. (But Luisa sometimes writes hers in as little as ten minutes! I know because there for a while last winter, she was in the habit of writing them immediately after I posted the prompting post at The Morning Porch.)
“muni-mula”
This?
It’s from childhood TV exposure, I’m still buzzing with half-life from a cartoon. The phrase was a Rosetta stone to an alien robot’s language.
I’m remembering all this? I must have been activated.
Oh dear. Sounds dangerous!
A CODE OF SILENCE
Who will tell you, or know what to tell you,
what you have been pieced together for?
Were you not made to wait for that one call?
Words, numbers, cannot be trusted. Silence.
That would be your only language. Muted. Wait
in resigned silence, like the alloyed moonlight
slipping past your silken bivouac into another
night of waiting for a Silence on the sheets.
No one is on this, no codes were made to break;
nothing works except silence, suppliant/defiant.
When your call comes, pray do not use the door,
but climb down your cell from your window sill,
clambering down clutching knotted sheets, like
the thief descending on an airborne carpet…
Against the obscured moonlight, your shadow
disappears. This time, keep your grave’s silence.
—Albert B. Casuga
09-06-11
“Code of Silence” is also posted with minor revisions in http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/09/code-of-silence.html and in the Facebook.
Love this one, Dave. (And I’m with Luisa about the last four lines, even more so now that I know about the coffee tin.)