Listening for Unicorns

I crimped my remnant heart without even trying
All I had was a twenty-three second phone call

An attempt to respond to a digital message

In a direct apportionment of choice in the universe  

As if there was something I could have done differently

To alter the outcome, some combination of phrases, pauses

Or assertion which might have presented the aura of personhood

In a divergent shelter or empowerment that would have resulted  

In additional communication at minimum to alleviate this miserable chasm

Percolating in my abdomen judging me like an old acquaintance

The arbiter of the nights of the nowhere phone calls

The stares and waiting for rings like milk-carton people 

As if I could remember any face or they could recollect mine

I peek behind the curtain and see vastness

Stationed in a foyer with an entry door and an interior door

Neither of which opens very often and when it does it is typically wind  

Or a solicitor selling candied goods which my taste buds abhor,

While the populace drools and I am confounded and sullen

Resigned to realize that the salesman was the only opportunity

For speech that I will get this day or quite possibly the week  

I try not to feel the cocoon or get over excited at the site of the mailman

That today might be letter day, every month and a half or so

There is typically something intentionally sent by a human

Rather than a computer program generating my name for corporate bulimia

I emailed about my novel because she seemed like a reader

As if I could simply find a few souls to partake, then at least someone out there

Would gather a piece of me, maybe even love a character in the tale or find empathy

Or reluctance that one might wish one measure of absence in the protagonist’s life  

Were filled with a measure of beautiful reciprocation, and so if not me

Than a conceptual idea of me might be cared for in the well-wished sentiment

Of another in a hypothetical fictional parallel; I could at least imagine that

But no; this one saw a challenge, a move to this city  
 

As I had intentionally traveled outside my borders to avoid such intersections

Of courtship and goodwill and yet like Ray Stanz I had somehow created a titan

And was debating crossing streams at her request

And she actually followed through to her aforementioned message

Initiation out of the blue, handle that with the right combination lock

Can I call you back tomorrow and a week of silence reverberates 

I am not angry as the familiarity of a craven ache for oblivion resonates

I know such tiny things are oxygen, just the opportunity to escape

Into the scent of the street of ten million doorways

Years and brambles at least one resident gave me a whisper one evening

As if my size, speech and face were not the repugnant troll of horrid blankness  

For it is the foggy nothingness that hurts the most, the knowledge

That is all basic irrelevance that the very molecule of hope whispering

Is but a cackle of death reminding me what true life feels like

As if I just stayed in the silence for a totality I might forget what I am missing  

It seems easier that way, the long-numb, the blank-stroke of grayest paint

I hoped there for a few hours, even had trouble going to sleep

In anticipated nervous energies that my learned realist expectation to be ignored

Or discounted or left unanswered might be wrong; after all she does not know me  

How could she repeat the pattern if I keep my mouth shut; if I do not speak or write

Or act then I could possibly not be me and not me probably would not get treated like me

But yet he does, he is, he was and so I am exasperated into a folly of near barbarism

Against the remnants of any faith, of any hope of any belief beyond what is 

There is only what is and what is, is the grand estrangement of void

Of a boy born to be a poet cursed with a heart that could sculpt sentiments

In the universe having conceptualized love to such an intricate hue

And yet again and again I am simply treated as a ghost with phantom oration  

A transparent aura of bone and sinew which does not require response

I remember Bethany, writing so many times for a single note response

Anastasia and the dance floor and the one letter that nearly killed me

The Jewish girl on the quad, the actress brunet, and the years of awkward mute  

I remember the crab queen’s misguided reprieve with the payback beyond all paybacks

Into the damnation of nonresponse; even my nightingale took a month to simple say hello  

The messages wash like a cesspool of recycled bottles floating in a mid-Atlantic

Whirlpool garbage-island each un-retorted, there was the psychologist from Baton Rouge

The Friday of illusion and now a mysterious horseback rider

Just light me on fire, just crush me, just care enough to hit me across the bow  

The idiotic want just damns everything;

The house isn’t really sold, the job is not really real, and neither is the girl

They never are