STRANGE MAGICS
Political survival
and street sleight
trick object permanence into retreat
an overdrawn account
of our dizzying quest for entertainment.
Seasoned charlatans
and dear readers alike :
Perception is a dying breed.
Qua machine, we spend
our energy unperceiving.
Daily mind outweighing
engagement .
Miracles of filtration we omit
and omit.
The gulf between your and my .
I would like to friend you.
I would like to friend the bodies
on my screen and make them into a point
on the horizon that I walk toward.
How many weeping
people do we see
before we think weeping.
How many
have we seen “in real life”?
She takes your hand.
Across the electro-sphere.
She takes my hand.
As a document of hands.
I am trying not to puzzle
this out.
What’s missing has its reasons.
I am trying to enter the experience
of double negative equals a positive
in cyber time.
Exes and Ohs.
My boss did not answer right away.
I said What about real kisses?
I thought I was the girlfriend type.
That was the day my email officially
became criteria. For what I am not sure.
Pilots maneuvering drones have the same rate
of PTSD as pilots flying bombers.
But I am not sure the principle applies
to iPhones. Perhaps if we could see
body warmth on our screen,
as drone pilots .
Otherwise known as hugs and kisses
sighs and longing
charm and counter-charm,
All the ways of accessing the moment as an anal of the moment.
+++
FIRST AMONG EQUALS
The winter light is so total.
Enter the Ice Queen her waters
rising faster than imagined
the best insurance is not to care...
it’s all about going to the gym
or it’s all about the type of arugula (baby) or it’s all about..
the tavernas that cater to tourism,
as a kind of skillset.
In countries reeling from imposition ,
tourists are locusting outward into
the very heat of things fetid and skunked.
Here we sit by the palm trees
a woman talking avidly about immigrants.
I am fingering my clichés —
butchery and escape.
A rising tide. And in the dream
of the Ice Queen, she is particular
to Turkish Delight.
Somewhere in Istanbul not Constantinople
an old man is leaning in to kiss a child
long time gone. The people have been crying
and the moon is rising in its panoptic way.
I’ve always been a good tourist
sitting next to this woman her issue is immigrants
Let me stop you, I say.
His kisses are a death cult.
It’s nobody’s business but whose fantasy is she anyway?
We all scream for the Ice Queen.
Airplanes fly fish from the dying oceans
into Las Vegas, that fire of a bygone empire.
I’m the best kind of tourist.
I tip well. I shut up.
Take me to the underwater hotels,
and indoor ski slopes, to castles built
by cold dead hands and
the endless kitsch of home-cooking
on a blighted local currency .
Moonlit nights and Turkish Delight if you betray
your sister for a woman who freezes time
in its tracks, of course you find yourself amazed
at the state of things.
+++
THAT IS SO LAST YEAR
The look that made
last year’s ingénues into a bold moonless sky
A columnist writes about sex robots
as a viable option for lonely men.
To take away their problem.
To take their problem out of public spaces.
To stop them from harm.
Lonely men should be its own pronoun
way possessive declamatory.
What makes loneliness a condition...?
What makes a lonely man into a situation?
A fox in the henhouse.
Who cannot feed his vixen.
And each and every hen
leans into the story.
What we might call jolie-laide
the beauty of what is ugly
in parts
is unavailable to loneliess.
Sex robots are gorgeous.
Expensive. Loneliness being a costly hobby.
Lonely men are not the same as sensitivity
or exceptionalism
they are a way of understanding lovelessness
in a world that gives them lovelessness all over.
I was lonely at times but not as a structure.
I was a man in my heart but never as a social condition.
I would not sex a robot. Even if it called me by name.
My heart could not be in it.
And I am all heart.
TYPO
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