Tape recorder.

Crouched behind grandfather’s chair whispering. The air is choked with drama hot as virgin sin. I can taste the silence cramped full of antiquity and that pale gray feeling of time. It’s all here and in this mythical, magical, place where death seems so real. I spill my guts.

I weave poetry into short story unbreaking, unwavering stream of conshitness into the rectangular black tape recorder. It’s covered with bruises, tender loving scars of the only abuse worth using: language. I was never one for numbers their meanings empty and they leave me so dumbfounded, stupid, obtuse, and angry. So I speak in song, soliloquy, and simile.

I entertain to the whir of the spools collecting confident voices of characters of my creation. Heroes on horseback and steadfast soldiers galloping, marching to dispose of despots and dictators. I speak them, because I cannot see them and much more so can never be them. Sometimes I stop to rewind and revel in the moment ever so small where I seem so big. My stature nullified by the sweet anonymity of magnetic tape encased in transparent plastic. These voices so proud that don’t cower on couches, that don’t sob silent tears in the night, that don’t hide in crowds. Still they’re just phantoms that haunt that moment, that moment and nothing more. Their resolve and bravado so alien and absent.

Crouching behind grandfather’s chair it’s still impossible. Even fiction can’t silence the vacuum of fact and youth remains bankrupt, its character hollow on the perpetual (e)motion recording machine.

Tape recorder.