I just got a cellphone this week.
I don't know how to work it.
But before I got the cell phone, I had an answering machine,
and I also didn't know how to work that.
Who's running the gag lines here?
Karen.
Wait till you read.
Karen Brennan, your next reader.
But I don't actually make a lot of calls,
and I don't actually get a lot of calls.
So in many ways, the answering machine was superfluous,
but there was just this image of this sort of digital zero
in the middle of it that I kept seeing all the time.
"The Zero on the Answering Machine."
Back when I drank, I didn't give a fuck or if I did,
I did something dramatic, and not infrequently, final.
I don't know if you can relate.
I don't know if you've ever stared into the red-rimmed eye,
the digital knot in some of your life,
and said nothing, and said it too late.
October, with its O like over, And the cold rain
that has fallen steadily all morning
seems somehow to have entered this poem.
How do the wrens, those dun paupers, abide?
Back when, huddled inside the birdhouse of the bottle,
I wanted to feel nothing.
What I felt, instead, was the feeling of feeling nothing,
and felt it acutely.
All my dull remorses sharpening their knives.
It was, then, less revelatory than bemusing.
The abrupt flare of a light bulb above the head of a light bulb,
such was my cartoon.
Whatever I said bled from my mouth like roadkill
in the talons of quotation marks.
So much dictation, I never raised my head from the page
to see above me the sleek migrations
nor the bleak swollen gape of the sky, opening, and opening,
and how to close it now?
I don't know.
If you can relate, you may have a date
with your own extinctions.
I hope you arrive discreetly.
I hope you retrieve the message I left--
Long time no see.
Meet me?