~
Black as coal.
Moth or myth?
It helps with the lights out.
And travels by thought.

Cleopatra enters Rome,
Dropping names,
Reciting pagan poetry,
Knocking on forbidden doors.

Nicole sees shadows
Of her former self
Staring back at her,
Rock paper scissors,
The color of three.

Give and take after take
On the burning soil
Of a blurred crusade.

Typewriters
And other assorted weapons
Form white lies and alibis,
Calibrating the dusted variations
Of a caught-on-camera obscura,
It is a dark waltz,
Some small hope still,

Yet there's a comma after still.
~

I knew we were in trouble
when they taught the machines to talk

parliament of artificial owls
nocturnal park line pirates

watch and learn
these conspirators
abduct the listening chair
and strap deniability to
another infernal device

so some hotwired pilgriming woman
possesses superior ****** abilities
and a skill with
the violin, the pointy end

camera is king

yet all the negatives
have been destroyed
still somewhere out there
remains a flash card
and a hybrid set of eyes
watching all the people fall to pieces

we're perambulations around
collapsed buildings,
rather than the collapsing buildings themselves

me and the machine
of contradictions
sick as our secrets
with all kinds of shenanigans going on

welcome to the age of copying minds
onto hard drives and cellphones

a future too heavy to carry
and so we plant it deep into the soil
letting the cables sleep
like fading city lights, receding
like strange fractured reactors
at the edge of the world

in lieu of flowers send hope

scavenger bride,
she counted periods
before the children came along,
but never suspected
eyes like bottles
beginning to blue,
a tangle of scars
hermetically sealed,
the new order of
a broken romance,
dead love cassettes
in the glove compartment,

her cold and empty
constellations,
like cold breath
passing through a beam of sunlight,
grid of points, pendulums,
the ratio of freckles to stars,
no subtle countenance,
martinis and bikinis,
soft ******* and ice cream,
slight, elusive things, on a beach
with no more meaning,

the repeating pattern of
her mistakes and reliefs,
a preservation of decay,
sustained by the tiny
human fault line
in that oneiric hinterland,
between dreaming and waking,

she draws around the noise
and the clearings,
she creates within that sightline
the way her sadness can feel
comfortable,
an extension of loss that turns
her ruins into a home.

~
"memory runs back farther than mythology."

two years,
two months,
and two days,

in a cabin they built
near Walden Pond.

on a mission of gravity,
the heavens forming a spotlight
on centrifugal force,
abroad the hollow mind,

chronically untethered.

"I went to the woods to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..."

this ship's captain was an architect,
but her starblazing failed
to break ground,
so this life is now a structure settled upon sand,

and way out yonder,
where there is
no blade of grass,
just weeds growing out from under the floor.

but her daughters are
grinning magnets,
passionate machines.

"copy that?...," asks Houston.

she takes a long, hard swallow,
the shadow of a bell
inspiring the astronaut in her
to shoot for incapable stars,
but the bell she hears now
is that of an alarm clock
telling her it's time to wake up:

shoulders straight.
hands free.
arms strong.
fingers stiff.
chronically untethered.

she's not looking for new days,
she is a new day,
compacted out of water,
tired of changing real estate
and showering with
other people's success.

those loud kids, her kids, play
down the hall, in the beehive.

radio jargon's on full blast too
and telling her where
to buy and sell today's instant pleasure.

she's busy now with self-stimulation,
Betty Dodson Method,
then mixing orange powder
with 100 year old whiskey
kept in the lunar module:

it's a spacewalk to eternity, faster-than-light:

she sees broken pool tables
and backyard swings.

she sees 'ordinary'
checked off on the calendar.

she sees 'happiness'
hiding in an old photo of Murphy's Camp.

she wakes to
her husband, Houston,
in a holding pattern,
she feels him moving, whispering,
and touching something
far off inside of her,
but not moored
in a specific time or place.

in search of where
she now exists
(if she even existed at all),
her memories feel artificial
in that she lacks
the emotional attachment
that comes with
actually having lived them.

there are no answers, no choices.
only reactions.
it is always going to be
that broken state of things:
these days of heaven,
chronically untethered.

"only that day dawns to which I'm awake. there is more day to dawn, I suppose. and like us, the sun is but a morning star upon being dreamed into existence..."
~