I’d rather you climb to the top
of an apartment building and pour
an orchestra down its stairwell,
just let it fall like rubble through
a trash chute because I’d rather listen
to the necks of violins shatter
and cellos crack open like walnuts
in fistfuls of sheet music and splinters
than sit still for another apology
composed to sound exactly like
the truth, I’d rather hear a piano
trample eight floors of tubas and horns
against its will, its hammers smashing
luminous brass bells like pop cans,
I’d rather absorb every second
of something marvelous being
crushed mute than your confession,
I’d rather count the resounding
bellows of timpani skipping off
concrete walls and tumbling over
the steel nosing of steps that seem
to bound on and on toward a bottom story
because it’s there, in the basement,
where all this noise would pile up
like words that once had meaning,
words that were instruments of living
instead of recital, and if you were
to do this, I would take it in
from start to finish and I would be
moved, technically, having never heard
such an unrepeatable arrangement
of disaster pronounced that way before,
a symphony of wasted language
that owes me, as you do, some art.
