On Streams Of Silence... Poem by David Levitas

On streams of silence we move,
mouthed by sightless voices and mechanical tunes,
Automatic responses that catch at the model of what we pretend
And others believe, we are, consist and where our music and meaning lie,
portend and crave, even in soulful, sinful suffering;
Catching in the vapours and exhalations of the breath,
The circumference of dreams, the velocity of desire
And linked to the machine stutter of cash, the staccato
Of where others account their wealth; drugs, telephones
And the credit entabulatures of receipts, home to the radio orbit
Of what they believe, lies within; in reality, a mirror
Of the passions one is attached; the pitch of one's standing;
Of the seamless thread, as on a wire of where one stands,
How distraught; the identification of culture with one's reality
And the dream like visions interspaced that catch at every murmour
For a confirmation of one's fall from grace, the mangled response
Of soul and body reft, mingled with the spirit and emotion,
The blood and flesh of imagined crime and forces passion,
Of the judgement one is burdened to feel, uphold and maintain;
Like the lifting of a telegraphic sentence that bites at every vital,
The hyman of one's being pierced and expressed like a runaway train;
And then see in the fading light the solidity of the silvered wooden bench
In the reflection of the cabinet of many medicines,
The reflection of spirit and pump in a glass that's transclucent
And a face that appears to others, smoking an endless cigaterette;
That bespectacled monster the identity does not recognize;
While outside in silent sympathy and tense apprehension, the tort reminders
Furrowed in lines that score their aspen willowness, by where they've stood,
Towards a sun that never sets but who misleads us in iconographic simplicity:
A phone booth on every corner to maintain their staus quo.