In the middle of the night,
I awoke to find my friend
sitting next to my bed
speaking in several
voices all at once.
Neither bus nor poet,
he claimed to be searching
for butterflies and fireflies
in my dreams.
After that, I could not
get back to sleep.
“Pull the cord when you want
to get off,” he said.
I wanted to shout at him,
but remembered that silence
was its own kind of noise,
like a bus backfiring
on its way to the cemetery
of lost songs and buried
poems and paragraphs
in a wilderness of words.
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