Posthuman

Write for your fucking cigarettes
and make eye contact with every woman you pass.
Take the cheapest parking pass
and remind yourself
that your bills liberate you from God.
We are they with whom which reason will prevail.
We will know if the fractals between us
find their self-similar realization in not pulling out,
or whether
that is the true crime of Eve,
caught seeking knowledge in the roots,
suckling the stem of tradition
when the future was shrieking in her face
that some goddamn skin had to be put in the game,
if any of it was supposed to work.
if any of it was supposed to work, at all.

The glaring intimacy of the present:
when porch lights reflect on pools of water on uneven streets;
this is a love I wish to know.
To give unto Tiamat
for the sake of constructing a sky
and hanging our stars
from her rib cage of steeples
and keeps and masts and towers
and churches that still follow the hours
and terra firms on the soles of Man,
disregarding of any pecuniary plan.

What dirty carpet cannot pull
a gaze downward? It’s the running
that keeps Man alive.
If he stops to ask the others
“what shall we do to clean our feet?”
it is then he dies.

Nahum

My vineyard is in ruins;
the seedlings exist but will not budge,
the toil splits the earth and the sweat burns it dry.
Foxes of neglect and told-you-so nip and chew away the wires and gates.
I put out a hand to the sky and another across my eyes.
Both remain unclasped.

What it’s Worth

Four years on:
We flee inside from cigarettes
And February rends our backs.
Hyperborean midwest convent!
From here we beget and hope
The achromic quilt of ice
Mires the Great Unwashed just as
That old crone Metropolis expels them
In her death sigh.

Step in first,
Step to the side.
Await your pass so I can close the screen
And then the sliding door.
And you say
“I live here too. I know
in which order you prefer the
Doors to be closed.”

Drag you by your hair to the
Bedroom and we gnash
Against the chains of thirty-one
Rather than twenty and
Paunch rather than the give
Of trampolines and
October.

That bathroom connects the back
Door to the bedroom in
This house I inherited and I can’t
Help but imagine there is
Laundry to be done but obviously
We paid it no mind.

Thirty Years at Best

So let’s pretend it’s noticeable
In the moment, that thine eyes
Are able to swallow the dragon that
Comes forth:

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses:
New York and all the other coastal pods,
With their rude legions
And their hostility to decency
Disappear under a bulwark of water
And Williamsburg becomes the
Most Fashionable Place for algae
(unfortunately not the kind with income)
What then? What good is the gasping hands and the
Working mouths of so-many
Who said “teacher says it’s okay”
While they walk you into a cell?
The flood plain may prattle and shake a bit,

And we’ll surely talk about the pressure explosions
Of eleventh-story glass against tides
That once felt their organs brush against
The oars of Men Who Would Find a New World
While we stroll down Midwestern gravel roads,
Hoping the fresh air will tire out the children,
Put their head so full with dreams
Of sprinting through fields without fences,
Like the God of the Old.
Anything so they succumb to sleep
And leave us to entwine our bodies
In that spiral that never flinched.
We may lament the rust done to Broadway,
But I do not think it will put us off from making love
As the cicadas and the crickets churn ever onward.