Silence Is Your Music

I remember you saying, just a couple moons ago,
Silence is my music.
It turns out that Ai Weiwei said that too,
Maybe even before you did.
But that’s OK:
There’s enough silence for everyone,
Even one thousand and one John Cage imitators.
There’s even enough for a million multiverses to emerge from.
Hell, there’s more silence than the sound of
Ten million jackhammers reverberating in Midtown Manhattan
Or the vibrating tymbals of a trillion cicadas,
To say nothing of every folk song in the British Isles.
So now that that’s settled, let me say for the record
That music is my music.
But on that, we can agree to disagree.

M. BOGEN
SEPTEMBER 2016