are crowded very crowded indeed and so they are small very small compared to their countryside relatives and so the small Tokyo ants they communicate with small Tokyo ant sounds like this (   ) and they hear each other well, like this (   ) whether it is a panic sound (   ) or a food sound (   ) or a dead bug sound (   ) they can hear each other very well, very well for a species that doesn’t have ears. They communicate very gently but quickly and hear each other, all of each other, all the many numbers of each other very often and almost all of the time, except when there is a large Tokyo noise like a truck (truck noise) or a girl screaming (girl scream) or a Western-style symphony (loud orchestra) or something equally loud, during which moment the ants cease to hear each other at all, because at first they hear the noise, and then after the noise comes a ringing in the head. And then they begin to hear each other again, as they grow accustomed to this ringing in the head, they gradually begin to hear each other and the vibrations they make on the waves of the ringings in each other’s heads, the ringing starts to warp and warble a little bit, and that is how they find each other again so that no one has to feel lost for very long at all, no not at all.
 

DECAY

             from Jorge Boehringer, and a performance of Gayageum
 

The great desire is to get inside of it — the poem, the painting, the music, the woman —

An ant, perceiving itself to have failed to get in anywhere, takes one brave leap off a cliff, thereby making its last and final attempt to get into something, somehow.

On its way down, or perhaps at the moment it lands, (none of us are quite sure), it makes an undeniable percussive sound as its body breaks, pops, and for the entire duration of the decay of this sound, it is as *inside* as it can get, there, inside that sound, however short-lived, who cares if it is witnessed or not.