Robin Williams was
a room full of radios
blaring at full volume,
each tuned midway
between stations,
the air crackling with static gristle,
country music, traffic reports,
names against Dad,
religious shills rattling their tin cans,
frayed choruses intoning the Big 90 from Sandusky,
bad weather, more static,
crazy laughter from the side of the road
where old factories hide behind the tree line,
the end of the dial veered into infinity
and deep into the wilds of wicked, vengeful chatter,
every voice cursed with an accent stumbling
and bruising its verbal knees on the nonsense sounds
that make English the playground of sex without joy,
Robin Williams was the Kirby Crackle
of each machine in the house
coming on with a lurching jerk
after the power has been off for a week
and the city experiences
that hardship of vines creeping
under the door jambs
and attaching itself to windshields and store front windows,
his was a telephone ringing two floors up, three doors over,
all night, under the bed, scaring the dog
and making the cat’s fur stand up like haircuts
that remind that liberty
is a code word for fuck off and die,
the left end of the dial grows louder in the static,
all the music, news, weather, sports,
Baptist preaching and miracle cures
for a preferred assortment of cooties are sucked in,
the room we speak up with the radios and such now
pulses and puckers, it is the rant
of something being slurped, liquid and quick,
the room is empty and is dry as old bone marrow,
quiet as cars without gasoline,
there is only sun
from the window, a breeze,
night time coming.
.
Ted Burke
.