The Museum of Ordinary Objects

There is a town in central Pennsylvania that boasts of fertilizing more aborted museums than any other city in the nation.

Fishbowl

I stood on the street corner in ripped jeans and an army green jacket from the second hand store. I held a cardboard sign upon which was written in sharpie: “I’m not starving, I don’t want your money, and I don’t want to change your religion. I’m just a guy holding a sign.”

Buffalo Jump

(First published in The Oval vol. 4)

silence is the edge
between delight and
a buffalo jump

eel String St.

(originally published at The Nervous Breakdown)

The call comes in replicate tones–
what we transpose as sirens
of the ear, drum down now
the thrickthrummbumb of the hollow.

It’s up to you
to wrangle notes like sheep
and fill the coffers of our ears
with maple sips from syrup strings,

your etched woodslapping hands

(The left,
whose syncopation grip
ignites the void,
as the epileptic right
portraits into many
faces a conglomerate
clockspring of gods)

Reach deep into your tool belt of non-void nothingthings:
the space between notes,
old breath, empty
anticipation,
electric potentiality,
incorruptible strips from a corruption
which dissonance cannot untune,
even that dissidence which
must itself
un-be.

There is more sound in
silence bound
than in open fields of noise