One for CandyApples

More Noise Please

by Steven Jesse Bernstein

I live on a street where there are many, many cars and trucks and factories that pump and bang and grind all night and day. It is a miracle that I can write poetry or sleep or talk on the telephone or that my lover will visit me here. There is so much noise. Every few minutes a jet in comes in low or a prop job swings down like a kamikaze. There is an airport at the end of my street. The New Age people say that you choose all these things, choose the cars and trucks and airplanes, me and all of my neighbors. Well, maybe this is true, maybe we can't live without all this God damn noise. Maybe I need the noise to write poems, make love, and eat. I'm going to hang a sign out my window that says More Noise Please, or Thank You For Making Noise! Maybe we are the kind of people who need to have what we don't want just to get along, to do the basic things. Myself, I could not sleep last night and I could not close the window, either. I tried to tear the window out of its frame and put it in a closed position, banging and ripping with a hammer and a screwdriver, standing on the window ledge in my socks, three stories up. But the window wouldn't come out, the factory was screaming and the trucks were rumbling and the whole world was praying for silence and it was up to me to shut the window and I couldn't get it down. I was just making more noise. A jet went by and all the people waved. "Thanks!," I yelled as the shift changed without a lull in production at the big plant across the street. The workers lined up at the bus stop, watching me with my hammer in the window. I put sponge stoppers in my ears but I can't stand those things for more than a few minutes. Finally I put my head between two pillows. It is the same every night. I love it. I need it. "Without you I could not live! I would not have written this poem!," I yell, the window dangling half on, half off.