Bill Freind

JUST LIKE ALAN LOMAX BLUES

            your name here   .

on your voice mail: hi, this is what'shisname
illegible writing followed by a circle with some lines through it
laughter
 

 if you'd like to make a call, please hang up.
 
 

when you call, you get this message: he no longer works here.  pause.
you remember visiting his cubicle,
how he sang among the maze of walls.
 
 

What makes you think I'm his replacement? the message asks

                        pure denotation of the recorded voice,
                        lost
                        its incapacity to respond
 

no further information is available

if you'd like to hear a poem, please start talking.

            Some new form of worksong: digital spiralling
                        a trunkfull of tapes
 
 
 

that afternoon you see him stumbling drunk downtown
            arm around a woman
                        sunlit smile
It's Tuesday. People work on Tuesday.

                        worksong:
 

later you see him fistfighting beneath an overpass
story of your life it's like being late for the stoning
 
 

            count on it: whatever you have dialed has been changed

later another message: but meaning peeks in through the cracked door,
accumulating like a) lint b) dust c) sleet d) uh. . . . love
 

                        on your answering machine he sings lullaby for you
 

magnetism an aid to memory, to music
 
 

            all that happens while you're out
            an end, until tomorrow
 
 

PASTORAL MAW

Duplicate owner sloving sale eggs.
New unmatters drop the usual lacks from trunks.
In the parking lot they are demanding an end.
The usual answers: ordinals, paper
into the surrounding wood. Into.
 
 
 

            doors             unthird
 
 
 

                                                                        out
                                                                                                                        slur

            sheet                                                 read
 
 

                near                                                                                                 in
 
 

                                                    flung                                                 flagging
 

            lune                     near
 
 

                                                            with                        out
 

                        end

                                                                                                                        all

                                                                        uncast
 
 

CUSTOMER SERVICE AT COGENT MALL

And was partial. Or was want of dissolve, theory
of behold in a blue line dancing to the iffy hum,
a dream of new pantries lost in the roar of peach trucks.
And then the sublime emerged in the wrong place,
stunned, as it always is, looking like a jet-lagged
tourist who doesn't speak the language and only feels at home
in the airport. That was your eye blanching my borrow. Meanwhile,
fashion outlets have been selling out of sunglasses and worker's uniforms.
He had lost his condition in a movement toward banners and was left self-same.
I'm kind of fond of this partial desire, your Eminence.

Freed of something needless past the guards flattened paint,
antiface of some repute feels perimeters and rows in dark.
Twilight to buy from those who know where you live
and will pass the door mussed at meany palming.
Loss of the midrange is a desire for everything. These
are small chilis, insured in the driveway. We
are no longer precise, like something only silkworms could eat.
Enhanced, zoney, the bringers of the prom mop
with their cherry progrom and someone says woo
moving to the obscure second verse. What emerges
is a demonstration of ineluctable historical truth.
Isn't that the exiled former president? I came in search
of a story but something wasn't dark enough.

The change machine stands for our narrative skepticism.
Challenging decoys. These stale disrupts that no one sees
bringing lunchables and a bad moustache at the end.
Language becomes as graceful as wallpaper. Scientists are also
falling over each other for the prize of aptest analogy.
December, 1944: Paul de Man leaves Brussels with family for Antwerp
where they will live with his father for remainder of war
(much of this time probably spent in translating Moby Dick).
I was swimming so I didn't notice that history had ended.
This is a necessary condition for the revival of the nation.
I'm writing now as a reluctant member of that community.
Hey, who took my smithy? I'm calling the casino.

I'd heard that opportunity has a new address but I was too busy
coming up with a smartass response to write it down.
Which is more revolutionary — the escape key or the pause button?
"One week ago, people considered Kim Jong Il a monster,
and now they think his glasses are really cool. It might sound funny,
but I think that's real progress toward reunification."
Just another dull quandary so drop the page and back away slowly.
Anyway, I'm feeling helmy and outcoached, sprawling corrected
and reaching for the dialectical climax that you left by the sink.
Parachutes are aphorisms. It's part of the new cleanliness.
 
 

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