For Benjamin Smoke
In the only televised interview the one that flickers through gutters of time. The one that never happens. Or, folded into future frequencies. You move through dissonance. A series of desperate gestures. Your hands, trembling. The spectre of growing up poor during the final, failing century. Broken shards of glass, remnant, excess. Your hands the hands of Jean Genet, broken- down Hölderlin. Queer, white trash. Remainder. Alone, and never not filling our small decadent room with pills and boys and beautiful but sound-less music. An endless concatenation of crystal methamphetamine, cigarettes, black and white photographs, and the prettiest ripped thrift-store dress. Quietness is not silence. It is its own music.A bleaker frequency, Rutherfordium, non-radio. Antigone, alive, just barely, in the high-rise outside the god-forsaken southern city. -Cynthia Cruz