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