Talk

"A woman who
but looks up to trouble"
says a woman's voice, then a
baritone tells me "A calm sea
has your knee." I'm walking the
late night halls hearing scraps of other people's
TVs as I pass their doors. I could collect in one night enough
titles for a lifetime of novels, should I have any desire to
write novels, which I do not. I hardly ever even
read them any more. What can I do, then, with
all these quotes, so mysterious and yet so
mundane? Collect them, that's all; if I gather
enough of them I will have more than
the storied output of all those
monkeys. Maybe that's all it is, anyway, this
jabber from screens, through doors, deep in the night:
monkeys talking. Two days ago the
jabber was of higher quality - it kept saying
Obama, Obama, Barack,
Barack Obama. I remember thinking how lucky he was in his
name, one that it's almost impossible not just to
keep on saying, but he's not the
only lucky one - we get to
have him around. And now if I could just
get someone to scratch my back I could
go to sleep.