Voicemail Poems

I felt like masturbating I felt like crying It was the twenty-first century Already A quarter over There had been artistic movements & wars My debts had been repackaged Countless times The enemy of my enemy Followed me On Twitter, now called Ex-Marines shot themselves in the head in their aunts’ basements We lost touch almost as a whole Category We listened to music for evaluative purposes Had to turn off Shostakovich a recording of quartet #10 that churned too fast like history A choir with one boy who couldn’t sing But tried to follow, quietly Teachers like cigarettes fired or quit My memory got so bad I said the same thing a hundred times Into the wax cylinder Like the moon changing in the same ways Like the water falling back to earth The killdozer guy said it was like people couldn’t see The 50-ton machine he was working on for a year and a half Even though it sat there openly In a shed, folks coming and going “somehow their vision was clouded” It was the twenty-first centur