Tonight's Poet Corner: The Noise Upstairs

The Noise Upstairs
by Belinda Roddie

It was a twelve-string guitar,
grunting out the entire Dave Matthews discography,
accompanied by the cough syrup-clotted rasp
of a stranger with his brain on fire.

Said stranger had strung his limbs up on
straps as thick as Twizzlers, their needles
slurping insulin and fury beneath his bulging
clavicle, but still his fingers were free,
and his calluses rose in ridges
against the thin, intestinal steel.

Pulled from the guts of salvation,
he stayed alive so he could sing and pick,
for another twenty years. As Matthews intended,
the ants started marching to the music, and the man
as a boy played under the table and dreamed
big dreams, and all rhyme and reason dissolved
like a giant gel tablet into a glass of whiskey.
All homage. All dedication. All breathing
below the satellite.