Plucking out the fattest blueberries
to pile in my open palm
—fingertips still sore from blues licks at the week’s guitar lesson—
and consume
Listening to every unverified track in my iTunes
to cull out the garbage
—incoherent electronic babbling from distorted mouths—
and condemn
The berries are mostly signal
little noise
few are discarded
The tracks not so much
little signal
many to discard
I am sick of so much noise versus signal
—though I still respect unabashed genuine noise for noise’s sake—
I want a vast collection of golden nuggets
and nothing made of lead
sweet plump berries, not underwhelming sour ones.
Tonight I am a monster
devouring the berry bush’s children.
Deleting trash
and killing dreams
And I shall sleep just fine
slumber visions of blueberries and blue eyes
disturbed only by dreams of bleeding fingers
from endlessly bending Les Paul strings
I grow more callous as my fingers do.
