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Thank you to those who support me via my Paypal account: rikwrybac@yahoo.com. The government doesn't read my poetry. You do. Out of over 400 poems here on this blog by me, I hope you find one or more you like. Thank you for my readers. Thank you for your comments.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

RADIO!!!



Several months of recording
my favorite radio
for the time of no internet.

Poems of life and death?
NO!
Poems of radio!
My friends and companion
with music,
classical and jazz,
as I write or read
to Mozart or Horace Silver.
Their emotions
of time and place
counterpoint to this moment.
Their genius in quavers,
passions in piano and forté.

There may be many
whose ears are stone,
but they weep for me,
who cannot fully see
minute expressions
in a person's face,
who has failed
to find someone closer
than a steel tower,
electrified and pulsating,
the waves undraping themselves
inside magic boxes,
pouring their nakedness
into my life
through boxy mouths:
their magnetic teeth
sculpting Beethoven's brain
beside that of Bill Evans.

From these vibrations
I am pounded
as if I were a piece of hot iron
that began in distant childhood
lying on a sofa
in the dark of night:
a lonely little boy
out of contact
with any babysitter,
with any parent,
neither interested
as I connected
with the Lone Ranger
or Sergeant Preston
and his dog, Yukon King.
I saw them all
in my imagination
that relays
these images to you,
my companions in the radio,
surrounding my body
with their love
no person has duplicated
in my presence.

So now,
you know the truth
why I can't connect
to anyone
why I'm unable to see the nuances
in the crevices of a face
in the creases beside the eyes.
It all passes through
my imagination
created years ago
in the living room
of a new house
in the 1950s
on a light, gray-green sofa,
that imagination of a world
no more real
than the fantasies
I lay before you now,
an emptiness,
a canyon with no walls,
a tundra with no snow,
characters both good and evil,
dog sleds and silver bullets,
word vibrating
through the memory
of a little boy
who never got up from the couch,
who stiffened with every gun shot,
who heard the wind
and the blowing snow,
the barking dogs,
horses hooves on the prairie,
and the crackling of a warm fire
that was never there
except as cellophane
in a sound man's fingers.

Nothing around me seems real;
it's all just radio
that I turn on and off.
Volume up.
Volume down.
Join us again next time
as boots break the ice
or stab a stirrup
and we're sent through
time and space
in waves of energy
pulsing through walls,
through bone,
through the intangible,
the unending
billows of a sofa


Barry G. Wick

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