Have unplugged the radio from the wall.
It was my last subscription.
I believed in the segments.
The millipede kept crawling down
even though its issues weren't wanted.
The clacking of its scales kept hours.

I twisted an antenna like you twist an ankle.
It didn't hurt.
A cigarette in a glass came back to life,
unrotting, unsmearing. Puffing up
like an indignant purchaser of Tic-Tacs
seeing a personalized slice of indecency:
the cut. Heat.
The doctrine of continuity by the register
has been interrupted by... by
someone,
someone very long and footsy.

I didn't cut the space in front of you,
the cord cut a line in front of both
of us. See? That's me at the back, by
the closet with kitchen towels in it.
They have stripes.
I drop one.

There are fifty stripes, but we need fifty-two.
Drop just one, though, and they scatter
like a roost of pilot snakes. No... no,
like millipede doppelgangers.
I unplugged the radio, I snapped
the antenna, I clipped the segments.
They just ran with it and hid.

Listen, undulations on the vapid, listen
trials and subscriptions and pipelines and
mainlines and freeways
are never created equal,
because they never leave the mailbox.
They are rubber stamps on ether.
How should a delivery person know
how to retune a radio without a tuner?
The tuner finds the tune,
the tune plays the old Moog,
the Moog croons, but it knows it's lost
its fingering, knows it's guessing.

I plug the radio back in, because
I want to change the weather.