Peter Dubé

TO SPEAK IN TONGUES AND FASCINATE

Turn up the volume everywhere. In each and all the rooms you frequent let the sound expand of radio, the telephone, of stereos. In corridors, and corners and the cars you ride all day, each day fill all untaken space with sound, and different sounds at that: the chatter of pundits molding the world’s work, the chords and phrases of bright melodies, the hawking, squawking keen of salesmen in the agitated marketplace with names and virtues of a thousand products on their eager lips, the static laden with the possibilities of noise, the flickering fading of the signals as they course between the city’s towers and yet more. Fill every place you move through with the most unyielding of their incarnations. Stand amid them all and trace the sorrows of a failed, a fading adolescent dream, the insurrectionary ardors of a band on the globe’s more distant side, its other face, that far away demanding unknown profile. Remember dreams of revolution in a city too removed to be accounted for by you: the news, the news of things unseen. Go on with rigorous listening; absorb them all; fill every vein with it – the flowering glory of sound – and wait enfolded. Sit stirred with noise and fantasy for days until you quiver, all but covered by the pulse and until every word in the cacophony feels clear, is clear, is limpid, lucid, perfect and perfectly meaningless, is emptied utterly. And then get up and go. Go out into a ready and anticipating city filled with novel speeches you could repeat in sleep without the loss of a sole syllable, alone, such words as you’re enamoured of. Release them at the tip of tongue and hold the eagerness that comes to you, to heart. And watch. Be heard – anew.


Peter Dubé is the author of four works of fiction: Hovering World (DC Books 2002), At the Bottom of the Sky (DC Books, 2007), Subtle Bodies (Lethe Press 2010 — a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award), and, most recently, The City’s Gates (Cormorant Books, 2012). He is also the editor of the anthologies Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism (Rebel Satori, 2008), Best Gay Stories 2011, and Best Gay Stories 2012 (both from Lethe Press). Conjure, a collection of prose poems, is due out from Rebel Satori Press in 2013. Peter lives and works in Montreal. Visit www.peterdube.com.