More from moria poetry

from The Frequencies

96.7

Call it another rhetorical device to recreate the century’s slipping music, but the crowd still won’t let me in, even though I undid the drummers with a joke, easing the lingering tension in a light bulb filled with moth shells. It’s moving in step with the city, something like a petting zoo & everything becomes public eventually. Because there was an ad in the paper for a job just like mine, I couldn’t help but bruise the downtime, rubbing the pelt the wrong way. What purrs inside the city? Inside fields of corn & wheat, tobacco & rum, trying to focus the rays since colors could add to it, edged in by the airwaves, tumbling from the towers, the music that slips, that follows us like fallout. The bleachers were crumbling beyond the buzzing wires. Beyond is a thinning crowd. If I put my back to the radio, it doesn’t mean I’m not listening. It means I just want to belong.

© Noah Eli Gordon 2003