Mic Checks

"the ear is the only orifice that doesn't close"
--from Sharon Hayes' Parole

Your silence blows the
Ears off my head

So that what I'm hearing
And what isn't seen
Structures the rupture

What's left-over
From speaking privately
In a public place

Some ways to imagine
Not being them
Being sous rature
Or simply tongue-tied

If the tongue
Had eyes and they
Were here

If they
Looped like history
Like the history of
A scream

Or steam from that
Whistle not yet blowing


The voices absent in this present
In their presence coheres a statelessness
Without subject

Sentiment is the tenuous
We screaming again
Words one lip-synchs for their life (RuPaul)

Discourse schools a public void
In private just because
You put a mic

On me doesn't mean my voice
Will carry

Or anyone is out there listening


We are archivable which means
We can easily be forgotten

We are public which means
We are double/multiple/substitutional

Through no lack of repression
Do the words finally appear

However private we are however
Rich our interior life

[politics which pressures the inside out]
[politics will smoke us out]

[politics will drive us into the world]
[politics will drive us into the open]

Where any one may listen


To this resonance pattern
To these distances wherever you go
Voice a form of intimacy without control
Emotions before they formed and hardened
Into a public speech

Which summons us all these voices verbs
Recorded but not sufficiently heard
Stricken from the record it would seem
Before sound could appear
Thinner than the thing-in-itself
The magnetism of all lost futures


In the breaks silence sticks
Wakes the dead from trace

The living from paradise
Semblance sleeps in our ears

Across eras cross-phasing hatch
Private spaces in public

Tongue in my mouth in
Your mouth mic checks.