Diversions

He wanted to hear his imagination,
to build a megaphone,
extract the voices of God from the nothing.
Or so I heard him whisper
feverishly as he tossed and turned.
Usually, I left him to himself.

He stayed in the Factory all by himself,
littered the floor with the sketches, notes, cigarette butts of his
imagination.
Daytime in the prison courtyard we took turns
crushing spirit with white and blue megaphones.
And I'd pause for breath at night and hear him whisper
about extracting voices from nothing.

But it wasn't nothing,
he said, straining to hear himself
on the other side of the mirror, whispering.
It wasn't his imagination.
All he needed was a megaphone,
like the white-and-blues, but bigger? He returned
to normal sometimes. I would turn
around, and there he'd be, like nothing
had ever happened. No megaphones,
no burning bushes behind his eyes. Just his old self.
Times like those, the grindstones of his imagination
paused and things were okay, like before. Except for the whispers.

There were always the whispers—
long conversations—he listened, spoke in turn,
consulted his notes. His imagination,
he said, was not his. It, too, came from the nothing.
And he would lay out everything—his work, Factory, me, himself -
and try to put it all together in the shape of a megaphone.

It wouldn't look like a megaphone,
he explained in rapid, absent whispers,
his long fingers weaving massive networks between themselves
and God. Wheels and cogs and giant blades turned
cacophonically week after week and he still had nothing,
forever reinventing imagination.

He sat quiet and still, the day he turned on the megaphone.
It worked, he said, and I heard nothing but whispers.
Was it my imagination, or was God talking to Himself?



Rodin Entchev