Daily dose...

on the train this morning, watching a woman in fur struggle to get a signal from her cell phone. Yes, on the subway. I think it was her first time.



And reading (again) Noah Eli Gordon's The Frequencies, which is somehow even better on a crowded train while wearing headphones. Very tempted to rush to my desk this morning and type in 99.3 which accrues gorgeously.



But I had copy to write, to edit, a 1:00 deadline.



And now that I've time, I see it's already out there. But I hope nobody minds if I repeat it here? [Sorry, I don't know the code for justifying the right margin, if such code exists.]



99.3



Because my brother didn't hear me when I told him to hold the bird calmly, because there's nothing confessional about waiting for the bees to come, because they forwarded me a batch of the letters you marked return to sender, because I had to steal the keys to the station, because the scissors broke on the binding, because the radio fails to gather symbolic form in the rhetoric of silence, because we don't embody anything like an airplane flying over Wyoming & covered in light, because I left the little red book in the back pocket of the seat in front of me, because I wouldn't call it a ready-made radio, admit the danger in getting too deep into anything, because there's difficulty in differentiating between the work I've done & the way I handle the impulse to unbuild it all, because understanding is outside the static, because it didn't appear anywhere on the bandwidth, because it's sentimental to send flowers, because someone requested California Dreaming, because the Rolodex is already outdated, because the smell of burnt leaves is nostalgic for nothing, because it helps with happy endings, because I'm unable to listen for more than a few minutes without wanting to write myself in, because it takes stillness to see motion, because there's a white-picket-fence ideal, because the treaty was a washout, because the card-catalog century is enough to whistle the afternoon gray, because at the station I could imagine this one or that one, because they're alone, because they're dancing, because they're on the road, because they're between places, because they're listening, because they're always there & just this or that, because I'm afraid of getting to the point of proper names, because there are call letters, because they've sunk so far below the idea of surface, the little bubbles take years to make it home & this new city is empty enough that its seams are starting to show.



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