Cashiered in the starport city of New San Francisco, where the oral tradition extends priapically to coffeehouse poetry readings and the open mike, but never achieves the popularity of football at the Fill-A-Stein Bar & Grill, he feels discomfited as a coelacanth in a home aquarium, lobefinned and lonely. Here the poets are mired in self like insects in pitcher plants of their own device. They cannot see that bright stars are shining through the pleasure domes, that living tides course endlessly through the ground beneath their feet, that the native poets manqué have long since retreated to warrens where no man walks. Can they possibly imagine the wars their phagocytes wage? Their poetry is a mundane litany of diary entries, of the dreary days and dreamless nights of idle psyches. Laughing, a popular lesbian poet seizes the microphone, offers a paean to the pleasures of alien sex, to a list of her drugs of choice. The applause is deafening, an exorcism of the spirit that sends his body staggering after as he flees the café, abandoning the open mike and all that it stands for. Outside, in the city night, the poetry of silence dies loudly in every street.
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