"Community Life in Poetry"
a year of poetry, a day of celebration, a constant community voice

Poetry

Do Not Drink and Dial
a trilogy

Yes, and there was that actor too,
legs paralyzed, heavy with sleep anxiety,

reaching for the phone, falling
in slow motion,

no one knows how far into drink.
Head bursting from hard memories,

all that need
flowing out of him.

Surely, you remember that game
played with two cans

connected by string.
How we swore we could hear

voices crackling along the white cotton.
Our frustration of faith

for reaffirmation
of each other.

Now all this comes to me
in the most unlikely of places,

under that painted vault
where two fingers are separated

by one inch
of silent unrequited white.

2

Frantic to reach you,
I call the wrong number three times.

Suddenly music, an unknown
little percussive burst

through twenty holes in a receiver;
some new lover’s fingers

tapping on my small drum,
or soft Victorian wind

from parted lips
blown at ear’s cliffside.

Hour upon hour of friendly persuasion.
Nothing imprisons like distance.

I am willing to have
just the electric air of you.

3

There is no velvet in your voice.
The bell-tinkle of ice

against the glass, acidic,
a Bette Davis drawl.

You’re undressing in all the wrong rooms,
out in the open in thought’s lingerie,

flicking ashes
on sentimentality.

Every phrase a maudlin stutter
like some ventriloquist

drowning works in water.
Then that giddy change of subject

a body thrown from a car,
smile growing on you face,

pressing its way through the phone
when you ask me not to call drinking.

-- Michael Sickler

Reprinted with the permission of the author.