The Typewriter Caught My Sound

 

“Charles, we are both ‘Friends within the Darkness’”

1.

I don’t even feel human when I write

My fingers just tap, tap, tap!

I am a Roman crucifying thoughts

With letters for nails, fuzzed and electric

Deep puddles of carbon black, fake black, pixel black-

Like gasoline in a gutter.

 

Gutter.

 

That is 130% human

To drain the rain like waste

And build faceless boxes

To better swallow the colors we invent in our head

Like vitamins.

 

2.

Shaved nails, perched lips, Perrier water with lemon drops

I am high brow culture

Taught how to parrot etiquette

And how to bend my tongue just right so it rolls right off when it probably shouldn’t

Will you one day take a straw to my words

So someone else will pet your balloon head

And agree that you’re little brain matters in the expanse of everything.

 

3.

Oh terrible, terrible novelist you sit in a Porter John

Wearing a purple top hat you swear is a crown

While all the plump girls and boys with stuffed smiles

And cherry-flavored dreams gawk and gawk and gawk

All because you whispered something one Sunday afternoon

(‘Fairy tales do come true’)

And now they’ve swallowed it all like root beer and-

BURP!

Out comes their forgivable ignorance.

 

4.

I wish this keyboard could talk

I’m tired of the echo

And it’s not even a proper echo

It’s that same bass drum being dropped down a dry valley

That’s all the applause I get for these goddamn thoughts

The only criticism, the only response, the only admiration

A banging after my fingers dance terribly

Like a caravan driving over a field of bodies and bones.