pityingly

 

 

 

I just realized, I wont be able to tell the

new children about

phone booths. Of how, after driving thru

unbeknownst towns,

there was this need to get ahold of

someone without fidgeting

on squares you kept in the dark

of shirt pockets. Where the

essential meaning, the gist,

of arguments, could be witnessed

thru a coracle of glass where the

threshold of a collapsing door

was crossed with copper colored wings/.

That at the core of all broken

lovers is a cooling obsidian hardning from

which flakes have been struck

for making impliements and trust

would leave a scent of pity behind.

What happened to talking? Breaking

up has to be done in person with a

disexchange of rings and wrinkled brows

like multistoried flats and garments flung

as old flowers at the base of long stairways.

 

I heard that Brahms gave up writing symphonies.

Until he, waxlike in a meadow, heard a clarinet

player; summoned his bestie Schumann, (whose wife he was screwing)

who was attempting suicide, to come pick him

up from being vexed. To talk to him softly

until her got his s**t together.

Reviews

[Beccy]

Curious how, when in today's world we are surrounded, almost hounded, by instant global communication and connection, we are perhaps more alone than we ever were.

350 billion texts are sent worldwide each year. I expect the day will come when one can buy an app for breaking up.

Beccy.

[Matching Socks]

This takes me back a little, when I was a teenager I didn't have a cell phone. They were around but not everyone had them like today. The number of timed I looked for quarters and a pay phone to call my dad after a bad date... Good times.

[Tree]

Taking it back, breaking down the past so you can absorb the present. I liked the reference to Brahm, a very good analogy and had no idea he and Schumann were tight, need to look for a biography. When lives of figures like that intersect it is almost always interesting... (on a side, that finale of the last stanza, one may have gotten by you...) As for the Pay phones. I thought them extinct, at least in my old neighborhood. I remember visiting this girl once, in her up tidy neighbor hood /workplace where neither it nor she ever made me feel comfortable. I felt like an alien. But you know what? there were these pay phones all over that town, well kept and in good condition. No one using them to sell drugs or anything like that... Place seemed weird to me, out of place. Just like me, and her.

well done,d

[h d e rushin]

I've been to that town my friend..the local phone companies finally got wise to vandalism
and larceny (and of course the emergence of cell technology) do pay phones became a very
bad idea.. But there was a time, no too many years ago, when they like uppity girls in
tidy neighborhoods were all the rage.....thanks brother..dana

[JC]

man, your mind is vast and spirals along as you go from the remnants of our communicative past to the emotions that went through those wires to an even greater past of inspiration... this made me reminisce..all the heartache, anger and joy you would see played out in those plexi glass boxes like some miniature play back in the day..and you inspired me with talk of how at any given time by any given thing or happening we may be inspired to create or change...

[h d e rushin]

that's the point of poetry perhaps Jason.. that poetic inspiration is ad infinitum and happeningread morethat's the point of poetry perhaps Jason.. that poetic inspiration is ad infinitum and happening
at that exact intervening time. i'm sorting out the solutions from the frivolous with consideration that not all events or happenings are "poetic"// thanks Jason.

[Ed Hart]

now where am i going to break in and get a hundred dollars in quarters, and other small change...damn

[LJW]

I am a rotary phone in a bluetooth world. Landlined. What was supposedly supposed to connect us has left us disenfranchised, moving about in a virtual space the size of the unfathomable universe.

No one talks anymore. We press letters on a flat screen, imagining their effect when the screen on the other end reads our message. An exclamation point, the clothes flung at the base of stairways, an icon with interchangeable expressions our emotional barometer.

Feeling this, Dana.

[W.k.kortas]

It's an odd thing, how, if you are of a certain age, the process of becoming alone required the presence of another person, and that process could be a process literally seared upon the brain (cf. the detailed description of the phone booth), as much as an epiphany as that of Brahms hearing his disembodied clarinet. This--and you, dear dana, as well--is fiercely analog in the best sense of the term.