1.22.17

It sounds like water.

It sounds like the simultaneous urination of a thousand massive beasts.

It sounds like applause.

It sounds like a crowd telling you to be quiet.

It sounds like what exhalation sounds like from inside the chest cavity.

It sounds like relief.

It sounds like a rake the size of a telephone pole raking leaves.

It sounds like JACKPOT.

It sounds like fire from the perspective of the thing being burned.

It sounds echo of blood in the shell held to the ear.

It sounds like chaos.

It sounds like peace.

It sounds like the frying of colossal meat.

It sounds precisely like a raging creek, and

nothing else.

Written at 9:52 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA, while reflecting on the pleasantness of rainfall in a place that hardly gets it. Also, there happens to be a creek nearby, which I can here as I write this. I saw something die in that creek today. Whether the thing died in the creek or because of it or before it fell in the creek, I do not know. What I do know is this. It had four legs and brown fur and floppy ears and it looked like an enormous rabbit or a medium-sized coyote. This poem is dedicated to that dead creature.