Personification is inevitable. It goes hand
-in-hand with reinventing the wheel.
It reeks of misfortune. Gives a mess
its mass. Is why slime
never forgets
its shapelessness,
while memory
foam must, in what doesn’t leave
an impression. My memory spins
our negative capabilities round,
round, like a record the dead
once held, as if listening were human
invention. Imagine someone who only touched
needle to vinyl. That generation who lost things
as memories, while I run from thunder,
huddle inside a train long gone
off the rails. I call for an Uber. A call
I did not even place. It’s all part
of this new deal, for which I am the delay.
Oh, blissful ooze. Oh, quantum soldier
of fortune. There will be an app for judgment
that we can’t delete. You correct me:
execution. Let’s get into this. That sentencing
is quite empty. The sentence is doubling
down. Computerication is enviable. I’m pretty
beetles you’d like to stick a pin through
& then trash can. Why care
for the shepherd tricked
into the slaughter pen. Let’s get it out in the open.
Herds. Human. Break. Bliss. Silo. Haze. Quant-
ify looking forward. To tomorrow, to block
me from negative space. Mince this
tender. Say slime can be a crown
of onions & it cries into my eyes.
Say chop away at wing & antenna.
Say leave me alone with my own
device. Say I’ll refuse rubber shell
& puckered mutton. I try & reinvent
new spin. It’s a table with too
many hands in it. It’s communal
as plague. It’s that you were invented,
but came first. The wheel who’ll originate
the hands that spin it. Say they only reach
a single herd so milky & sweet. Say it grazes
from beneath the screen,
free of my cutting board,
where you’re filtering all
of my chemical elements,
until I’m a looted grave, a generic
greeting for the slaughterhouse &
day of rest. Say until I press
the air
like a switch
& ask: when.
Say you keep all the bells
tolling & line every fence
in the schoolyard with birds of prey.
Say no car can escape into spacecraft
or credits.
& you cut
to blank,
cursor still
swarming over
whatever dares next.
Source: Poetry (December 2019)
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