I live in a great concert hall.
In its hard wooden chairs sit
The voices of friends, strangers, enemies:
Never are they all silent at once.
There is almost always music -
A collection of scratched records
For the phonograph on the stage;
I seem to be the only one who hears it,
And I haven't yet been able to turn it off.
I wander through the hall, trying chairs,
Finding them too hard, catching conversation
fragments or maybe listening for a while,
Until it gets too loud, and sometimes
Everybody's shouting at once,
So I run for the exits,
But they're locked.

10-13-72