(Guglielmo Marconi, 1874–1937, was an Italian electrical engineer who invented the radio. When his friends heard his remarkable claims that he would harness the airwaves to produce wireless communication, they tried to have him committed to a psychiatric ward.)
See the clairaudient
ensconced in his bedroom,
hunched over a jumble
of tubes and wires.
He paces,
straddles the windowsill,
ear cupped against the ink-dark sky.
Angelized voices cry out,
begging he craft the divining rod
to tear them from the ether,
to make them real.
Anguished he can’t free them,
he imagines
those disembodied tongues
as hungry ghosts; manticores
of the Industrial Revolution
yet to be conjured.
Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?
he must’ve thought
as his friends wrung their hands
during a wellness check.
They tried to get him committed
but he was already committed.
a slave of his own ambitions,
Bound by a dream more confining
than any straitjacket.
Psychotic, they called him.
Deranged and sick.
Marconi heard voices
inside his head and
hurtling
through vibratory
Heaven.
Until he crafted the scrying mirror
that made us see what he saw
and hear what he heard.
Are you listening now?
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