Stephen Radio has heroes but still doesn't know how to spend his time
he finds himself most weekends in stranger's kitchens in apartments that
want to be starships, and, if he's lucky,
the windows open and the leopards spill out onto the shoulders
of Boston, beloved city,
eldritch swamp colossus
Stephen Radio likes rooftops
he hunts for parties for the chance to scale the crowns of buildings
making friends with Allston high plains BBQers
and mission hill art school cat burglars
pushing his way past bathrooms hallways filled with boys with wrists
and elbows like scissors and board games and girls
with eyes lurking under bangs like deadly swingsets
maybe you know him
maybe you can tell from his name
Stephen Radio has his eyes fixed on the sky
he only knows where his feet are during wishes
he's a simple boy, he's no greaseball tightpants
with steamengine thighs
there are earnest dreams sprinkled on his cheekbones
he's trapped in the upper margin of the hub of the universe
where fire insinuates itself into the rust of the clouds
and the dotted lines of constellations comes into focus
And the rooftop argument is always the same
and the glowing coral mercury windows say
"You, will not find what you are looking for up there"
and Stephen Radio says
"I will not stop looking
I can taste these rooftops through my sneakers
I can taste the sky through my sneakers
the frozen descending marine songs of clouds
are attached to my shoulders
the stars live between my eyelashes"
and the shattered desert choir of bricks say
"You, will not find what you are looking for up there
You are lost
You are lost like the insomniac kiteflyers who cannot
rise above the living nightmare of dead family
and settle for windtangled orphancy
You are lost like cars, and lamps, and candles
You are lost like the moon has lost the sun for
the sake of the earth"
Stephen Radio says
"The trees know why we run
we turned one blonde unblinking eye to the ocean
and went wolf on oxygen
our jeans can turn these streets into forests
our fingers can turn rooftops to magic
Boston is a god
I will not stop looking"
And All the Lost Baseballs ask
"How can there be a god in heaven
if there are so many here on earth?"
Stephen Radio says
"the whole and the hule of the concealed divinities
of the sky can balance upon open eyelids
understand that to preserve is an active adventure of the heart"
and the ghosts of weathervanes howl
"the more you look, the less you'll see
it is impossible to learn how
to not touch something by touching it
the harder you search for the openness
of the world the more you will find
the concealment of the earth
the mystery is always the mystery
and it is never anything else
You, will not find what you are looking for up there"
Stephen Radio says
"I will not stop looking
there are questions that curl like saltwater
there are questions that smother like marbles
there are questions that smother like front end crash
and ten ankle pile up
but there are answers that can hold you like skin
there are answers that breath back
there are answers that can spread like radio signals
I will not stop looking for them."
“Stephen Radio” is by Brian S. Ellis. Copyright © 2007 by Brian S. Ellis. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.
For the musicians staying at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA
I am the mental hospital piano and I have seen hands.
Yes, you would call them hands, but I call them night-creatures
clasping chords in their teeth, translucent spiders cooing dawn home.
I’ve been touched by black boil-fettered fingers fat as tarantulas,
let me tell you about the spiders I’ve seen…
These are not hands, these are sky-scouting web-weavers.
These are not hands, these are teeth and eyes, and fingers like legs,
running, jumping, leaving, they are the quiet legs of children standing after being left,
they are the hospital-socked shuffling arrivals at 2 a.m. come to sleep in aluminum beds.
I have heard them speak in the language of pressed flowers: take me home.
And I remember every single last one of them:
Shamanistic surgeons, they tore music out of me with a rusty knife.
Dogs the color of urine, they howled hymns in neon hospital moonlight.
Heroin-blooded teenagers who wet the bed they were so terrified
of their hallucinations, they smoked me instead and got higher than Jesus.
I remember those towering monuments to loneliness
you call hands. They were peacocks spreading in front of me
and I saw their coats of bruises.
They sang like the dying, sang like mothers to children,
sang like a choir of prophets in jail.
They wanted me honest. They liked me honest which is to say I was broken.
Nobody on staff fixed my raspy keys.
My notes remained sour and they played me like loving:
not quite perfect, unlearned, without a how-to-book—played me solemn,
like tortoises making at loving, slow and fevered and with their eyes closed.
And though some were old, they were all ancient,
they were all legends for sleeping in hell while others walked through and got out.
They played symphonies that tore-down the walls
so drugged up hall-walkers fled their loneliness and joined in the fever.
They played onetime, completely improvised, endless and sky-scraping AIDS cures,
they played healing and they tore off their tourniquets for me to kiss
their bloody wildfires.
I have never belonged to opera-houses or your mother’s cushy living room.
I live with those who bang daylight out of moondust,
now you tell me how you do that unless you are built of magic.
They study their own burning bodies.
They transcribe smoke signals and tear the lightning from their throats.
I have heard five-tongued creatures smash sunrise into pulp.
I have seen rhododendrons blossom thunderously
with the quiet hope and hunger of living and dying
as they play and bloom and smash and burn.
And you call them hands,
you call them hands.
“The Piano Speaks” is excerpted from Advertisement For A Human Being by Shira Erlichman.
Copyright © 2007 by Shira Erlichman. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.
SHIRA ERLICHMAN. In her five years as a performance poet, Shira Erlichman has quite the list of accomplishments. She holds multiple titles as the 2004 Worcester Youth Grand Slam Champion and Worcester 2005 Grand Slam Champion; she was selected out of five hundred poets to showcase in the "Best of the Rest" at Finals at the 2005 College Nationals, was a member of the 2007 Cantab Lounge Slam Team, and this past summer, was selected out of two thousand poets to showcase on Finals Stage at the 2007 Adult Nationals. Shira recently won the Def Poetry Myspace Contest out of hundreds of contestants. She also recently received the honor of being nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Small Presses series. She has released 2 chapbooks, one independently, and another with Destructible Heart Press.
by Shira Erlichman
Available by special order
© 2008 Borders, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
