This Is It

The precision instruments require the art.

The art requires the sands of time roasting

in a previous season’s spit of sunlight.

I am morbid and quasi cynical, quasi right.

I encounter scents of juniper and orange.

Rambunctious hold-outs of the barren holidays.

The fields, I imagine, fifteen blocks away,

covered in mud, crow track, and tire rut.

It’s a beautiful day to spill off a bicycle.

I can hear the water boiling across the room.

I can sense what I need to do one more time.

Librarians across the country are accomplished.

Staring at my phone like workers stare at walls.

What future am I hoping to design right now?

A lingering aesthetic of plastic and paper.

Perhaps a chance to feel molten metal,

the liquidous hell that sits behind your eyes.

There’s a new calendar on the counter

and each glossy tear leads to another page.

Calm crux of conduction, in this one, calm,

and the larynx tightens and veins constrict.

A blue wash of pressure within the spine.

Labels of discomfort on the nape, shoulders,

the grease of the spirit of blanket meaning.

These poems spawn the circuitry soon to be,

networks, systems, connectivity, upheaval.

The man walks with determination on the roof

his coat abyssal as an alligator’s skin,

his disappearance an alligator’s decision.

The man, in his landscape of ins and outs,

reaching forward into and out of and away from.

 

Construction: Parts 2 and 3 are forthcoming. Part 1 can be found here.