DEVOTION: ODE Bruce Smith 1. Turn O everyone needs a reason to sing and then an editor, a referee between the crime and the parole, a rabbi for agreement of number and gender, for singular and plural, for the prolix and misspelled soul, if we had a soul and not just clouds and a battalion of neurons firing, firing back at one another. It was what we did as children: made a war and then another. The rabbi said let it make sense on some level: the lullaby and the homicide. The rabbi said for every song a shivaree. And no more home movie and its waaa, and kill the lights, the art, and be neither a puddle of suffering or a music in the making, and don't step on the singer. 2. Counterturn Nobody knew how she came to be like that: a parrot speaking her private Esperanto, like a radio left loudly on in a room, tuned to the Furies, confessing to a crime she didn't commit (her art), haranguing the government, but in the company of the bourgeoisie she was mute with the silence of a head trauma victim, polite, speaking in vowels, in yelps, and now I think it was the erotic shyness of being bound and imprinted by Him, the boss, the sergeant, the head honcho, the dick, her face a leather mask and words a voodoo that avoided imaginary arrows dipped in poison making a wound of the lips (genitals of the imagination). She wanted it. The jaw and cry was magic, was taxing. The sentence was the bliss of the tacit. 3. Stand And then I heard a voice-like sound and I shouted back through the polymers and magnets, the cross talk and the hum, through the lines and beams that were the replicas of nerve. And we called it phone. And its coils and un were the dendrites and the axons. Its synapses were our gaps. Its membranes were the flat spaces between one, say, in the East, with a skyline of no teeth, a skyline of battery acid, but the slaves were freed, and one, say, in the mid-West, water cured lady of the lakes where the plane went down with Otis Redding and all my hopes for Utopia and we called it distance and we breathed into it and cried.