"Fourier" by Lihi Z

VOICEMAIL POEMS

The voice spills / Over the telephone / Time morphed into frequency / And back again / A compression of sentiment / Unraveled by longing / It says: ‘hiiiii’ A conversation about nothing is spoken / The day’s errands / The planned social respite / A desire to lay roots too soon to build / Hidden within a sense of fear of the future / What lays beneath Beneath the telephone / Lies a manipulation so essential / Its how music to MRIs function / Called the Fourier transform / And as removed as you think math can be from philosophy / Well transform it into another domain / They are the same thing / What I mean to say / Is Fourier found a way to describe how something instantaneous / Is infinite / A pulse in time / Corresponding to a sinc function in frequency that stretches to infinity / Decaying, it’s limit approaching zero, reverberations felt less and less as you leave the instant behind but ever so present / Laid on top of each other like rain drops / Like a voice / Dancing in time But to get that voice back to me / The telephone truncates / Otherwise it would alias / His words would morph into something indistinguishable / Like he isn’t him / Like he’s the CIA agent he always jokes he could become / What I mean to say is in order to bring words back to me / Engineering dictates that the sinc function must cut off at a certain point / Not let it stretch to infinity / Practicality telling philosophy to stop overthinking or I’ll lose my mind / Or the signals can’t get reconstructed / He says he has to go / I know our conversation about nothing can’t last very long / If I want to preserve the instant --------------------------------------- SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast