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Notes About The Poem

"An echo is the only thing that can speak and not lie — because it doesn’t know how to mean." - Friedrich Nietzsche (not a direct quote but derived from his writings on truth as illusion, echoed in time).
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” - “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” - Friedrich Nietzsche (1873)

echo

Listen to poem:

Hello Echo, Hello Echo!

Echo
I never get no letters.
Even my shadow don't
follow me around no more.
I've posted many
notes to you,
cried out in the night,
hummed our tune,
sobbed.
But all I hear is echoes:
"Return to Sender"
"Address unknown,"
"No such number,"
"No such zone."

I opened these letters.
Heard what the echoes
said in reply,
but there's only
what I wrote to you,
what I spoke to you,
what I screamed out at you,
when I was alone, 
which I always am.

Why can't these echoes
lie for once, just once, just once? 
To give me something back, back, back!
I've tried and tried and tried.
I've cried and cried and cried.
Me shadows and me echoes
are the only friends I have.

Sometimes I close my eyes, 
I pretend I'm alright.
But it's never ever, never ever enough,
'Cause my echo, echo, echo,
my shadow, shadow, shadow
are in the 'Lost and Found'
but alas, I have long since
lost the address!
Hello, hello, hello, hello!
Anybody out there,
seen my shadow, 
my echo
Lost!

losslostfree verse

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