Hybrid Abstract I
@2016 Michael Dickel

Signal-to-noise ratio(nal)(ity)

I know we all want to be heard, our fifteen-minutes of fame, our marketing gone viral, a million views before noon. You like the screen to be blue. My fingers dance. Sometimes it’s a guitar. We’ve got our caps locked and fire our guns in the air, shouting to the masses who don’t really hear. Or care. I move out of the viewfinder, my t-shirt ripped. The t-shirt is black. How much noise can we listen to in a world of sound? How much sound signal in the end?

I know we all want to be heard, our marketing gone viral, our fifteen-minutes of fame, a million views by high noon. Sometimes my fingers caress the keyboard letters. You tap dance into the bedroom. Do you drink after noon, or after the sun has gone over the yardarm? We’re standing ready to reap the rewards. You weep at these words. People drop in on the website, get stuck like flies. They will pour down like rain, wash the spider into your brain. The picture is grainy. A million dollars worth of angst and pain down the drain, swirling in the clouds of destruction. The blue shines before day becomes itself. Such color languishes in blue ink after the day undoes itself.

At the end of the day, you want the graphics to be smaller. How much noise can we listen to in a world of sound? I want it to fill my screen. You sing, but no one brings you dinner. How much song is gone? Music is money. It used to be love. How far has it travelled? I walked to the top of a hill once. My knee hurt. Probably the song went to the bar. Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine. You dance at the barre. Song sat for drinks, forgot about the din of the noisy dung heaps selling blood and death across the doors. Ding dong. Who’s there? Nobody home. I don’t dance anymore.  You want to wear yellow. I like blue jeans.

SNR
@2016 Michael Dickel

Poetry Month 2016 | Fragments of Michael Dickel

Water Poems (a poem)
Flowstone Time (a poem)
SNR—Hybrid Word Dance
Veiled Lady (a poem)
My Brand Here (Hybrid Flash)
Rosy Morn | Poem | Essay | Photographs
Blue Notes (collage | poem)
The BeZine April 2016 — Celebrating Poetry Month
Circumstances

This post is my third for National Poetry Month 2016. This experimental writing (hybrid, if you will) started out as a poem of several four-line stanzas. I didn’t care for it. I almost deleted it. Then, I thought, why stanzas? Why confine the sound play with song structure? Why stick with what doesn’t work? And I played. I like this much better. Breaking the stanzas allowed me to do more, add more, delete more, let go of the failed structure. And, in the end, this is what the poem insists for itself—finding signal in all the noise, seeing structure as noise when it does not enhance signal. Letting organic structure point the way. Or not. Who knows?

A video lesson on Signal to Noise Ratio from YouTube