the line's open, though the higher purposes are away from their desks

Self Help

- William Matthews

It would be good to feel good about yourself for good.

The air is slurred, the seas are fouled, the body

the soul wrangle constantly, like Freud and Jung

in their endless duet from Ll Cuore in Maschera.

Can it be, that fully and accurately to throb, woofer

and tweeter pulsating as one, with your own emotions

is the fullest expression of the life force,

or whichever whispers over the dark waters set all

this lavish and heartbreaking fuss in motion? There must be

some higher purpose to whose faint signal you could,

so to speak, tune yourself in. You'd need ears like a pair

of vacuum cleaners. Maybe the static and dry-icy gossip

of space would come to seem comforting, and anomalous

noises, such as the one that sounded like the thinnest film

of foil, as long as a galaxy perhaps, being unwrinkled

for recycling, would also seem comforting, like a dial

tone: the line's open, though the higher purposes are away

from their desks. Despite the expense and crimped ear,

you would stay on the line, steadfast and unnumbable,

alert for the faintest bruit; might not the most minuscule

dapples of sound turn out to be duff-begrimed specklets

of instruction? You want to be one on whom nothing

was lost, but space never sleeps and you do, adrift,

with a dark and a lit side, and a noiseless momentum.

But wait. At last there's a message, faint as the rasp

of a match being struck on the bottom of a well, and it's

for you. Eat less flesh. Compare yourself carefully

to your neighbor. Don't tread on me. Let there be ego

where one there was id. Know what free advice is worth.

God weeps for the helpless, and without a sound.