In front of the mirror, a man opens his mouth.
It goes a long way, his look, because his mouth is wide open.
It is bigger than his face.
It is bigger than his face and he thinks of Fantastic Voyage
an American science-fiction movie.
The film is about a submarine crew who shrink
to microscopic size and venture into the body
of an injured scientist to repair the damage to his brain.
The man in the mirror doesn’t see that words leave his mouth.
Words that are shrunk to microscopic size,
but that sound still as loud as words in any language.
The revenge of the babies, who have heard
bebop a lula ding-a-ling shalalaa whap bam boom
mitigated to pink and celestial word beings
and were made to believe that this was language.
Every proud parent is a sound poet at heart.
Little words for little human beings
words that don’t want to grow up
words that become so small that they don’t fit in our ears,
in our books, our mouth, our language, our imagination.
And all that’s left is a rebirth of cool
hammered on household utensils
and things that get in our way
when walking around in the house.
What do words sound like when you dissect a smart phone?
And what does an essay look like if you categorically
refuse to use words that are part of our cultural heritage?
Giorgio Dursi’s Poetry Reading with sound footnotes is such an essay.
His words are a garland of sounds in the house of language.
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