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.
Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She served as poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and recently relocated to Washington DC. She teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
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