These digital talks will be our last warming moment.
Death spins around its axis toy, stapled to its own importance.
The only thing we ever got right.
And when I wake today I immediately imagine
Hourly disappointments saturating
Into an inconvenient stew.
We used to write letters to people we knew
Wouldn’t answer. A kind of denuded
Correspondence, one-sided, our words
The final ones uttered
Though they kept coming.
They float up there in our imagined depots,
Processing facilities carefully extracting
The truly urgent from the not so.
“I am still completely happy”
And that’s the biggest shock really.
All evidence to the contrary
I look up and down the tabulations
Wondering where the projections fan out to
And what will one day be interpreted
By my betters, the so many of them.
There are so many of these
Bitter captains steering through headlong catastrophes
Seeing only what is in their most immediate reach,
Slalom courses conforming to their blurry perception,
This is a terra-formation.
I want you here with me,
Listening is the only form
Of comfort I have.
And yet even that illusion I have seen through
A thousand times, more even,
And I recognize the limits of something so viscous,
It cakes the fingers like fine flour,
And you know it is there but for the life of me
I cannot feel it.
I listen to myself constantly
And have never been more confused
By what I imagine are the important questions.
Do I have to suffer so?
Where was this orange juice squeezed?
II
See the umbrellas from above, slowly twirling
In a carnival atmosphere, the streetlights staging
A massive disaffection,
Worse than declarations of love and war.
The memory produces so much sound
Grinding away the minutes like so many herbs
In a mortar and pestle.
Who holds the root
As firmly as that?
But for now we have to imagine raincoats
And the mannequins they belong to,
Walking agendas through the rain,
Upending once placid puddles.
The plans were well thought out.
We constructed a scene in our bedrooms
And as the water wicks away centripetally,
Like sweat, coursing towards the veined edges
Of a flexible product,
It is so close to its stashing yet resists indefinite jarring.
The street fills with these devices
Posting like letters to the heavens,
Mechanized hooks cranked askew,
Branching out as if ready to be embraced
Tentatively; a new lover comes
Through the archway with shiny hands
And as yet unbroken shouts
And faulty manipulations.
The chips are down.
The sense of what we are really made of returns.
It’s not a pretty picture.
Image Source: Anna Pearson on Flickr
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