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| John C. Mannone |
Sound
of Silence
It’s Friday evening at the mall
filled with weekend cacophony
of young folk in the food court.
Background noise is not soothing
white hiss or gray, not even a pink
buzz of beehive voices cathedraling
the mall, but a clatter of junk food
pans punctuating the ambiance.
I sit in the middle of the raucous
watching a long table full of silence:
arms, hands, fingers in rapid motion
scripting quiet words. In awe,
I see-hear the boisterous deafness,
the rattle-scoot of metal chairs
across blue & white tiles—their scrapes,
a grate to my ears—as they slide
into different slots, arranged in circles
for the group, so that anxious students
in an ASL class can sign to others
from the deaf school across town
to practice their new language.
There must be bliss in quiet places,
blessings for not hearing
senseless noise. But I am not deaf.
I wonder about this silence,
even in the anechoic chambers
of my imagination, I still hear
my thoughts course, my heart’s
snare, the drumming
high-pitched roar of blood.
Longing
Is there a place in the infinities
where I can see your thoughts, hear them
in the recesses, in the folds of my mind,
or taste your atoms, savor all your
up and down quarks—you, a wavefunction
resonant with my soul?
What makes us up matters
both in what we see and that which is dark.
We are held together by it all.
There could be no greater intimacy,
yet, I want a world saturated
with your touch, the marvelous
feel of your lips.
Algebra
Finding love is
like solving a quadratic equation. Sometimes the solutions are real, sometimes
imaginary, sometimes complex—the roots are thus, the zeroes—this is where
life’s function asking all the why’s intersects with the unknown, that X-axis,
a lifeline extending even unto the infinities.
Scavengers
A dead possum on the asphalt
on my way to Sunday school
wisps steam from red entrails
into the cool air inviting vultures.
They fold their wings over
the still warm carcass as if in prayer.
Yesterday, a drab brown sparrow
escaped the claws of death, but the fire
red cardinal wasn’t as lucky,
nor the rabbit that scampered
under someone else’s tires. Vultures
and crows always seemed thankful
for the accidental deaths. For what
other purposes are the scavengers?
St. Paul says all things have a soul,
even the stars. Heaven is full of them
each with its own story, like Corvus
the crow listening for whispers,
scavenging the dark for light.
Virtual
Reality
After the surreal image ‘Brainyo’ by Dana
St. Mary
Things to do inside a scribbled mind
is to see yourself within the matrix
of neurons mirroring your delusions
of a twenty first century schizoid man.
Loop around the polygon bubbles
of your mind where the cerebral cortex
used to be. Do you sense the Thorazine
inside each little triangle of memory?
By the red dilation of your pupils, I can tell,
yes. Your thick-lipped gauzy grunts verify
you’re in hypothalamus hyper-drive—fear
overtaking non-sensibility at one-tenth
the
speed of light.
Your primitive impression says it all,
though amidst color confusion—reds
yearn to be purple, greens transform
to brown, and the sunshine yellow
of your past shines hope—that’s the latent
vestige of your humanity… before
you sold your soul to the Government.
