Tripping

Does the whistle sound distinct?

Common trash found at the foot of my block. An unset stack of false eyelashes.

Recyclable trash cascading into a trash truck, sounds oddly like canned laughter on a sitcom. I drift in and out of reality to a reproduction of this dump truck sound effect in my son’s toys, while collapsed on the couch thinking about how to rig my old breast pumps to a transducer after a frustrating night using batteries and a guitar that weren’t very forgiving. I might be tripping. It’s 9:30am and I’m in the liminal state between phases of the day because I know once I start, I can’t stop. 

I spent the entirety of yesterday battling pretentiousness with vernacular—both self-enforced—playing with an orchestra, talking to news producers, making room for questions about pop music and songs. I end up on the right side of a ceremonial bowl, coming back into contact with the present, covered in smoke and grease, like a cooktop waiting to be scraped with the sharpest metal spatula in the kitchen, just hot enough to melt air. Instead I blew through my skin with sweat and ran five miles inside of a window, painting the pattern of a glove holding two smaller bells at the tip of my tongue. A dyadic pulsation in a frequency tethered to a cord made entirely of slack.

Does the whistle sound distinct?