It must be Tuesday 'cause all the poets are out. I always thought people stayed home on Tuesdays. Tuesday night, Sunday night. I dunno. Those are nights no one goes out, it seems to me anyway. Hell, you ever think maybe people stay home BECAUSE the poets are out? (Canned laughter). Anyway, this is something I never knew about you writers of song and verse,

until I started coming out to these open-mic rendezvous

to meet with musicians, poets,

friends and random strangers like you

spinning ideas,

from that lyrical turn table roster

Waiting patiently

hands crossed or sipping coffee

until you hear your name

you approach the stage, and

the Word is a needle

poised on a fine equilibrium

And you know

the - Silence  -

that moment electric

the stylus arm drops

and the speaker crackles

You push your mouth into the mic

and that moment is all spinning

like porcelain plates on tall cane reeds

your smile as forced and elastic

as a Chinese circus acrobat

The gears whir, the synapses

snap, the eyes roll back

and the jaws open

to speak in contorted words

once again

on stages anywhere,

like this one perhaps. Maybe. Am I wrong?

Most people stay home on Tuesdays it seems to me, unless they're out for a cheap movie. There's that too, but that's not you! Your the same kind of people who would stay up

until the small skulking hours of morning

when the shadows grow weak and thin

hiding beneath cars, behind trees

from the horizontal obliteration

of the morning sun

Don't worry,

they'll bloom again.

And you'll have to go hunting for Time

for that small patch of sunlight in the mind,

that isn't already copyrighted, or owned

or reserved for your day job

Naw man, the Silence

is that private inner space

where you tinker with words and versus

and other universes

as the city turns its clocks

I'm aware that not all writers stay up all night. That would be a gross over-generalization. But even still, I think all us poets have to scrounge a little solid Me time no matter what time we write, right?

For some, the Silence

is blaring at 5 or 6 am

after a workout or a run

Bless your hardy hearts

ye saints of good health

I raise a glass to you!

For others the Silence 

sizzles and softly settles in

after a haul on the blunt

or a hit on a bong

Just sayin.' There's all kinds,

out there

Ok. That's me 

from time to time too

Well, you can say that out loud now, right?

Now that its legal?

Yet there's still that prohibition of the mind

so lets break those casks open

wash our bruised 

and punctured hands and feet

in the spirits of the moment

and never mind

how you find your words

and how i find mine

What we share in common

is that all us writers are blind,

feeling our way from one idea to the next

in darkly-lit apartment stalls

above the factory-floor machines

scrounging for paper clips, printing ink

rolling papers, arcane symbols

and lingering ideas written in invisible ink

that you're trying to get down

before you forget

That's when the Silence sinks in

and the writer cocks an ear to listen

Finding the Silence is not as easy anymore

with the constant tintinnabulation 

of MacDonald's, 

Amazon, 

Tinder,

Walmart, 

or Starbucks 

ringing in your ear

I thought once,

i knew the meaning of eternity

by the hum of the refrigerator

until the blackbirds were freed in 2003

in the darkness of the Northeastern power outage

You remember that hiccup in the ohm of the empire?

That's the real deal, 

the ground 0 silence 

you'll have to find or create 

again and again. Your hands caress 

the subtle nuances  and double-entendres

of a new poem 

with Pygmalion lust, you sand lightly

blow the dust off the anatomy of its verse

so the zeitgeist ghost of a moment

can live on

In reality, 

we poets are the dust-bin archivists 

of daydreams and fleeting epiphanies 

scribbled down on old envelopes

and scraps of goos paper

to be arranged neatly into stanzas

newly-formed and digital

sometime, someplace, later...

And then, once again

its show time

the shadows take their places

backstage, behind the curtains,

wires, cogs, and transistors

before the lights blink on

that carousel of the mind

begins to turn

Gears whir

and click into place

and you retreat 

into the soft light of pure mind

on the naked stage

the stoney mouth grins

synapses snap,

the eyes roll back

the jaws open and

the Word is the needle

the speaker crackles

you push your mouth into the mic

and the blackbirds are released

until this animatronic moment  

has run its course

The stylus arm returns

in a horizontal obliteration of applause

and you find yourself 

on a stage like this one

or anyplace, eyes fluttering open, once again. 

Perhaps. Maybe. Am I wrong?