pedestrian:
note the reservation in the quiver of this voice:
"hello brandon, this is ----"

or the fateful stage directions in my own:
"he allowed himself to be drawn in."

[in the inscrutable subsoil of the physical voice.]

[am only one of millions, mostly silent.]

and then i wrote out "silence" in thick black brackets.

[silence.]

i.
were you to pin open quotes to the top corners
of the commonest phrases caught
in the remote necks of familiar voices,
and hold them to the light,
the mid-air architecture of your lives together
may show through the skeletal pauses,
the tones stretched taut over the yawning cavities
of fugitive phrases and their failing meanings,
and the living microfossils of accent
that it must be composed of.

much of this, of course, will depend
on your location in the supernal span
of the novel light of the first morning shared
and the sickly simulacrum of the streetlamp
under which a moving van is ever running.

ii.
in the stillness of the dreaming skull,
that capitol of the overwhelming absence
in the soft black instant of a newly covered cage,
the thin curtain of the sleeping face; concealing
the drone of a film reel under your breath hum,
itself so close it singes a remote degree burn
on the exposed skin of my bowed neck.

and within the tender perimeter of a whisper,
in the landscape of silence:
the slow stirring and fatal sorting of our heaped bones;
blood blowing in each
always behind the borders of nerves
ourselves...ourselves are sealed at.

subsection a: wordless couples, a diagram

limb-knit couples nursing they coffee
at some cafe staring off in waiting rooms,
memorizing "exit" signs,
neon burned in the backs of they eyes.
on piedmont ave., clasping palms
so as not to loose into
a thousand shreds of personals ad.