J. Resists the Urge to Comment on Your Blog, and: The Gathering Blues

• J. Resists the Urge to Comment on Your Blog
• Jeffrey Schultz (bio)

Birds appear to be singing at night to avoid competition with the high noise levels caused by our cities during the day.

—BBC News

Above the eight-lane's unexpected bottlenecks, brake lights'    red clogging the hardened arteries of commerce,Dawn's gone slack again in the sky's early sulfur, the lusterless    leaves of oleanders, the few stark and persisting eucalyptusIn which mockingbirds dismantle beetles, dilate and constrict    their irises' brimstone, wait for the Hour to come.We can't fault them for not trying. They gave an honest shot at    competition: studied the form of the personalized ring tone,Learned the car alarm's frantic medley. But a few smog-dulled    and twittering birds up against our great monopolyOf noise? Good luck. Each as yet undelivered bill's glassine    crinkles in the mail carrier's bag; each wireless headset'sSet to voice-activated. The problem's basic economics:    cheap goods. A glut on the market. The radio buzzes.Infrastructure creaks out neglect's old tune, which, since it offers    nothing for sale, no one can hear anyway. And now someone'sGone and stuck a sheet of vellum between us and the sky.    Light aches, and here, morning coffee and laptop, I'm alreadyJust one all-too-clever screen name from telling that blunt    anonymity we once thought of as the vast and numinous worldTo go fuck itself. It's hard to even imagine what that means,    harder still to find a moment for imagining the bus-stopAmputees, the grandmothers, the data-entry experts writhing    with the pain of their lower backs, the motorist's eyes, allSparrow-jittery as they try to guess which adjacent truck's    a thermonuclear bomb in disguise, which lane changeMight best position them upwind of fallout, how to hold    the ever-present Other at bay. And to imagine thenHow my easy curse obliterates them, how, even before that,    my thinking of them at all cements their ankles in abstraction At the end of the Real's pier. Waves lap at the pilings.    Another day drifts off in the ocean of the CPU fan's hum.And what about you, little apparatchik? What's your status    update? How many sit-ups, how many hours at the treadmillTill you achieve something remotely like your online avatar's    sleek coding? I'm sorry, what was it you asked? SomethingAbout the Self? What an awful racket it makes! Data clacking    as we hoist it around, all that weight which is not us but ratherSome romanticization or obfuscation or the details of a story    we'd like to imagine we've a part in. It got to the point I thoughtThe mockers were on to something, mockery now such common    currency, in their silence. So what, a general strike? An embargoAgainst what's not humane? A little good luck chirrups down    from the eaves. But it's no good. I end up talkingWith you when you're not here and forgetting to fill you in    on the details of our conversation. I was thinking of what,When we take away what obscures, is left there. Latitude    and longitude. Height, weight and hair color. The way I thoughtOf sending you something, a small gift or note, how I've retreated    so far into my own void that thought became real as anythingAnd so got you nothing and left me with one more half-remembered    nonevent. Look, somewhere a mist's just beginning to lift,Somewhere ice ratchets away from other ice and slips into the sea.    This city's stucco's started to flake; the bare, blank substrate'sLooking right at us. Feeling is something's going to give,    and we've got to be ready, you and I. In shadow inscribeSycamores' bark with shadow; in end of day's color-leached light    leave bougainvillea, leave hibiscus. On retaining walls, graffiti'sBright apocalypse; on security's Armed Response...