52/28: Wound/Wound

[rejectomorph]

There's a little cut, or perhaps it's just a split in the skin from exposure to detergents, on the tip of my right index finger, and it's making keyboard use a real nightmare. Plus I might have burned it a bit while frying potatoes recently. That's what I did to my left hand fingers a couple of weeks ago, and it was very unpleasant. Anyway, I don't want to be poking these keys for very long, which means I'll copy and paste something old for Sunday Verse, and I'll want to be taking a nap shortly, because the ten or eleven hours I slept out of the last twenty-four just wasn't enough. I'm running down like a clock, which is odd because my muscles are as tight as a fully wound spring. I need to relax.




Sunday Verse

Radio Thin Air

by Nick Flynn

            Keep the radio on softly
so it sounds like two people in the next
room, maybe
your parents, speaking calmly about something
important—a lack
of cash, the broken
cellar pump. Marconi believed
we are wrapped in voices, that waves
never die, merely space themselves
farther & farther apart,
passing through the ether he imagined
floating the planets. But wander
into the kitchen & no one
will be there, the tiny red eye of the radio, songs
that crawl through walls,
voices pulled from air. Marconi
wanted to locate the last song
the band on the deck of the Titanic played,
what Jesus said
on the cross, he kept dialing
the frequency, staring across the Atlantic,
his ear to the water,
there, can you hear it?