In Praise of Noise

The sound begins with a furnace
clicking awake in a two-room house, answered
by a few, then more, voices: gauges,

and old-fashioned watches ticking out of synch, in growing number,
so their tip-tip-tip fattens to a moan, joined

by a horn’s upbeat honkity-honk, then ringtones and speakers
rehearsing drawn horsehair, air in a woodwind, mimicking

a hand slapping a polyester drumhead, but unlike
these coarser frictions, playing the same, every time.
A car door bangs, a jackhammer hammers, and a bassline

purrs through a wall. The sound congeals,
sucking in more, a mechanical syrup in an IV drip, the automatic

ruckus of a robotic ocean, a symphony
no one wrote, confounding every pattern:

teach me the song that no one can sing, someday
to be the song of everything.