The dryer rolls  in heat circles, my door’s closed so I only hear it muffled.  Windows cracked to move air, city sounds leak in, the constant metal-ocean groan, sharp horn calls, tire squeal, the ambulance cry “Bring out your dead!”, the trucks, the 18 wheels moving it all around, getting it here, and there, whatever it is…I say that but I know what it is, it’s not mine.  The carnival is quiet down by the water, the plastic beer cups and candy bar wrappers pushed into mud, a modern mosaic.  Carnies sit on back steps of trailers in the corrugated dark, points of cigarette light, orange glows to punctuate the silence, conversations so well-known they don’t need speaking; it’s a life earned hard and hardly worth it.  The train whistle shudders out its soliliquy, a one-word Hamlet moan, MAX rattles over the Steele Bridge, the Willamette hisses and gasps beneath  with heavy-metal lungs. 

I’m Six floors up so I can’t hear the homeless, the TB coughs, the hawk-and-spit,  the Mad Dog tinkle of broken glass, the blaze-eyed sermons of the mad, the runny shits of dysentary, the scratch and scratch of lice and crab, lesion, abrasion, and grime, the snuffle of dirty-blanket pull, the shuffle of swollen feet in broken shoes, the grind of rot-brown teeth jonesin’, the fork-tongued whispers of the Fixers, the Giver-Takers, the Street Corner Undertakers, the Shaky-Handed Vultures, the push-pull promise of a needle in a vein, the laughter of the insane, the hitting, kicking, cutting pain, the ruined visage of an Abel-bodied Cain. 

I can’t hear the liquor pour or the dollar bill set on a dirty floor by dirty fingers for a dance, I can’t hear the open, the shut, the slide of doors and windows, the click of locks, and more locks and more, the scatter-jabber fall of dusty blinds, of kill-the-light curtain on bent rod, fans akimbo in their spin, staccato-green  glow of flourescent tubes, backlit years of dead flies and other crawlies, the nicotine ceilings, the cardboard walls, of TV’s tin-can patter , I can’t hear the scarring of tears on unforgiven faces, the infinite alone of staring eyes, the ever-pressing walls, the closed-circuit symphony of doubt, fear, loathing, regret, pain, lonliness, hate, longing, the thousands of intimate tragedies lived in the between-reality hours of every night, this particular edge of darkness that slices so cleanly to bone.

And I’m awake in it all, too tired to write, too bored not too and I won’t let it in, won’t let it escape, either, I’ll grab it and put it down, right here, and it will end and it won’t, it’ll stop and it can’t, just like this last word