1

 

Maybe those things are things for us to eat. 

A dollar shard winking from the cleft 

in the metadata.  My green is my green. 

I’m seeking a less pasty mucous.  

Do you have this life in my size? 

What if this broke?  Chew with your tongue, 

taste with your teeth, mince the open sea

of everything together with a piquant margin

of error.  Commands, imperatives.  Monads basking 

in the reptile-house heat of paid time-off benefits

to sprout dumb hungry leisure feelers.   

But where would the language be without leisure?  

More projects, less projections.  

I’m tired of the word parse but I can’t think 

of a better one to describe what I can’t do.  

I’m just looking for a dear, dear friend of mine,

name of derelict spacecraft.  Name of

this quiet earth.  Name of egg tooth, guardian of doorways.  

If it demonstrates form I’ll feel better about myself. 

But for those of us who love to be admonished,

the crumpled poems I pelt strangers with represent

evidence of parallel quantum realities’ 

bad-taste-in-mouth refusal to participate in group

mirror-gazing.  The general faints onstage 

and we are all worried even though we know 

all the tricks, learned them fair and square

from the scroll.  While they’re out polling 

we’ll troll for new circulars; the plan 

is an intervention by screaming tires.

Plenty of smoked rubber and piezoelectric

disks in the pantry.  Scads of abnegations made

in the name of life-extension.  Have a blessed one.

This is where the work is now.

The general is awakened by a unanimous storm of claps.  

Don’t pull that focus with me, chowderhead—

we both know the war room is also the mess hall.  

 

 

 

 

2

 

Who is to say we die?  All wings are conflated

into one colossal waiting to rub a noose.

How many Blind Willies does it take to gain 

that flexed-rust credibility fragment I need 

to finally complete that picture of myself—

the one I posted to your account as not 

representative of the man I need you to believe 

I need to not once have been?  Everything wrong

is white.  If you took that page out everything

would not make sense just enough to bring the work

into a space of nap-like palatability.  Wiggle room.  

Rub two together to release powerful ripples 

of attraction-intention, then score a high profile 

dialectical materialization in print.  Scuzz-market.  

Make the fade steeper to supply the desired distance

between your temporally frigid pawns 

and the future audience that wants to eat them.  

They know they want it.  Maybe that’s the influence

of anxiety talking through the new hole in its cheek.  

The psycho-pharmaceuticals ecosystem is still 

clean as a scalpel. To unearth or to conveniently slip 

upon, that is the question.  As posed to me by a hypnotist 

frog from the sonorous fizz of a blog.  Global block, 

bogged down by the fog in the back of the tent.  

That’s clearly a twentieth century conception 

of the restriction of personal freedoms.   

Our cities aren’t modern any more, are they.  

Noirish, rhetorical, and on stilts to boot.  

It’s a critique of room-temperature.  

You can laugh but I still can’t shake 

the suburban summer light from my work shirts.  

Every time you smell something burning

record it with pen and paper, and every time

you record something with pen and paper, 

burn it.  Thank God 

somebody’s got the blues.  Cold black vacuum 

of space or serrated/terrestrial yellow?

My profile adapts easily to new advertising.

I don’t want that leaf pressed into the palm of my hand.  

Historical fiction or hysterical diction?  

This typing is a mountaintop from which I withhold

my pronouncements while the next nuance of selfhood

finishes downloading.  Which means I believe

in completion as an inherent quality of being.  

If I’m not a student any more then I must be a thief. 

 

 

 

 

3

 

They are running as if they had somewhere better to be,

held down by their wet hats in the glitch-magic of early

cinema.  The concrete is the clock.  I worked really hard

on this song, harder than usual, and I expect to be an

animal soon, one comfortable on steep inclines, stealthy,

innocent, and saturated with sight.  It’s useful

to have schemes.  I dream frequently of spiders

and teeth. Pride in storage.  Content 

vs. head of a pin.  Consistent aesthetics are for

brain-decay addled meatbags.   I can forget I 

don’t know who I am until I start writing again.  

Now we can really satisfy this heretofore unknown

urge to share intimate things with people publicly.    

Take heed:  you are not a gadget, a fad, a slab, 

a brain in a vat, a fragment, a nag, an adage,  

a template, or a drag.  You are not seasick, derivative, 

split down the middle, congenital, generic, hermetic, 

apoplectic, didactic, spastic, plastic, or clammy.  

You are not an audience or a viewer, these

designations being politically suspect.  

You are an inimitable interface.  O schema,    

you are polis.  You are what you fidget with.