Paterson: Book II, Chapter I, p. 55

A Song for Nothing; or, "Rafters"

[horns enter]

Chorus of thousands:

arpeggiated risings, fallings

to a sound.

Let's sing, goddammit;

let's shout til the mother
fucking roof rises,
until it quakes

from the grey-dusted I-beams

posting up from the floor;

Let's sing until bolts rattle

in their holes

and hundred-year old washers

bounce on their foundings

 like makeshift tambourines;

until metal winks and shimmers

in radiating rooflight,

and silvered steel hisses out

the harshest cymbaled Cs:

                     SSSSSSSSS--

Let's sing, you sons of bitches;

let's roar from our bellies

with full-lunged, full-

throated, fucking

full-bodied gutsongs;

let's shout until pressures unknowable

push out against the walls

of our skin;

until sound itself vibrates

our bones,

our fingers,

our teeth,

until something threatens

and will

burst, tear, rip

out of us,

splitting us each

down our alchemical

middle--

Let's break, crowd of crowds;

let's swell, rise, and part

down our seam;

let's climb in walls

of mother-fucking water,

riven as the Red Sea,

hemisected as our own 

grey matter;

let's, let's build

our song of everything

until it opens,

it unzips itself,

it spills itself out

of our split-husked selves,

pouring from the hives of us

like a swarm of 

unbelievable bees,

Oh, oh, my god:
            LISTEN--

Take
this,
Jesus Christ,
please take
it;

take it
and keep 

taking.

KMC 7/2/11, 7/10/11