Oh friends, not these sounds!
Let us instead strike up more pleasing
and more joyful ones!
-Prologue to “Ode to Joy”
***
If you're anything
like me,
by the time you reach to hit the keys
for poem number
fourteen hundred and one, I imagine
you'll feel this
cold, arthritic brass-
tax-feeling come threatening—
to stiffen all your fingers
and stuff cement in each ear canal.
If you're
anything like me,
you'll still be able
to hear one thing, but it's
just the dull wheeze
of your own nervous system:
the world isn't singing,
it's saying.
It's saying—who needs immediacy
of rhythms
and rhymes and songs? We've got
catchy memes now.
It's saying—are you kidding?
all men are not even
cousins, not even
drinking buddies—let alone brothers.
It's saying—I got some
bad news for you, friend,
John Wayne's
real name was Marion Morrison.
But again, if you're
anything like me,
you'll say: Fine. Great.
Whatever. I'll just
write it all down,
anyway,
thinking—what the hell,
if I'm not at least tentatively
making music, then I'm definitely
shushing some.
