I want to know the secrets spoken in silence
Subconscious or sub-operative, like spies
Espionage
The world’s secrets seeping through ventilators
I want to wire tap you
Just to hear the banal conversation
The tediousness exerted
By a just sense of mastery
Senses sense misery
Does the Dali Lama pay his own phone bill?
I want to hear it!
Don’t tell me your grand ideas
I know I’ll hear about them soon enough
Instead, tell me the trials, the softly spoken anthems
Obscenities muttered under your breath
These are the things that are important
The annoying noises that crawl under your skin
Eat apart your ear drums
A creamy sense of hope expands like the nougat of a Snickers bar
The tiny thoughts that creep up, almost graspable
Then dissolve
Scattered like a colony of ants
After a foot is stomped
And panic sets in
An unnatural disaster
Filled with a natural sense of despair
I want to hear it.
I want you like a businessman wants the time
Searching, never quite right
Asking on the street
Throw up some posters like a lost dog or a lost camera
Offer a reward
And he asks everyone he sees
But they present their bare wrists
And shrug
And he sighs
And moves on
Scowling the bus stop patrons’ wrists for signs
I have no wrist
No signifier
No symbol
I’m an archeologist, knowing something’s out there, under there
Not sure what
Never noticing the nothingness
Unattainable? Or just intangible?
I’ve asked the bus stop patrons
But they just present their wrists
And shrug
And I sigh
And move on
Someone must have a clue, an artifact, an anecdote, a softly spoken story
And I want to hear it.