Writing at a coffee shop. Gotta let the sound go.
Tables full of people talking. Voices only noise. Something with the echo. Sound waves and how they ricochet.
Now and then a word breaks through. Caroms out like a billiard ball (streak of red against the green-felt static) to finally collide with some random free-range syllable it finds. Smack of email on angry; crack! as I didn’t hits the gingerbread.
Then all resolves into that undulating thrum.
I wonder how it would sound to them, these coffee-shop talkers, if I caught their noise in a bottle, carried it with me to an art museum — one of the ones that likes to keeps things avant garde, confuses the denizens of Dayton or Dubuque, lures them in with promises of lattes at the cafe, then leaves them in a white-walled room.
1980s television sets set on credenzas, each tuned variously to black-and-white fuzz, waterfalls of parallel lines, blue screens, and test signal flags.
And somewhere on a radio underneath a ficus tree, that hum of voices they should recognize. But no. It’s something different now. AM station out of Mexico. Three in the morning. Deejay asleep, sound waves free to ricochet. Record’s spinning, needle’s caught somewhere deep in the groove of a sound they just can’t, no can’t, no can’t, no can’t let go.
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