Andrew H. Oerke Byblos and Between the Letters for John Cage It wasn't the letters, it was twenty-five slugs of silence between twenty-six markings that stood for a Whitman's Sampler of soundings. Twenty-six noisemakers orgied in the garden and called their babies the Naked Truth. But it was the silences grew powerful since they had made communication possible though they themselves remained deaf & dumb. Memory became a pattern engraved on cellulose like faultlines on fingertips & palms, and still the unruly runes made love without regrets, endorsed by the vows of silence from the twenty-five zilches our songs pour through to get to our brains making minds, not of the sounds but of time to think before the noise comes pounding through the pause that wonders & ponders the between, where we stop, look, listen, and do futures studies.

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