In the 90s we wrote about cyborgs as queer meldings, humachines, never dreaming the brick-sized phones toted by 80s entrepreneurs in “Information Management” would one day anorex down to pocket-squares, mega hard drives dense with photos snapped to save every instant, and emails — oh, all the e-mails! — and advertisements, and dopamine games, and electronic social spaces, and spam parties and phishing schemes, plus digital trillions of invisible dollars, and evil malware, and also a presidictator’s disconnected rantings (insane as King George?) … floating like a trussed fly in a web of a million million toxic thoughts labeled “history” and “fact” … never dreaming we’d be ruled by this tiny device, tied to it as if to a beating heart, a working brain, a glowing illusion of salvation …
8. On my husband’s birthday, I think about writing a sappy poem and then decide not to
because i’ll save all the sap for the card — sentiment makes me feel gluey and weird or in any case odder than normal which is still fairly whack a doo tbh
i suck at lovey dovey stuff
if i had my way we would never exchange cards or have to write something in readable handwriting designed to prove just how much we care or have to buy consumer goods of ever increasing value and lack of actual use to demonstrate our avid willingness to prostrate ourselves financially on the altar of mercantile LOVE
but lately — perhaps to patch over my emotional awkwardness with a strange sleight of hand — i find myself dropping exclams like cracker crumbs: good work! well done! happy Easter! you’re amazing! have a great birthday! fuck yeah! and also emojis up the everliving whazoo
as if i’ve lost central control as if all of my emotions have been flattened into tiny pictures or overexcited punctuation dehydrated by an overwhelming need to toss something across a looming abyss
this is a poem about sitting on my couch bearing a chasm deep down into the foam sinking with gravity bit by bit to the floor where i will become one with the wood and eventually explode into dust bunnies then float out with infinite decades of skin cells like an exhalation
after resurrection we celebrate getting back to where we left off restart routines we stopped so we could rest in the notions of
rebirth connection peace
now we are called to carry on the busyness of work days fill in the blanks with numbers and words, check boxes created
by authorities we never see
pull up greasy blinds in crumbling rooms where potted plants sag into rotten roots shake off calm to fall back into moving forward with a sense of invented
april showers bring panic and puddles to the basement water worming through cracks in concrete coming together in a frigid pool at the bottom of our tired stairs
like the busy mice who visit my sister’s kitchen sniffing their ways in on the heels of expensive furnace engineers
and their cousins in Fox Point who burrowed into Nan’s garage to chew her SUV’s wires into hazy black beds then nested cozy across her useless engine
The day rumbles to life, shaking me, and as another dream swamp recedes I roll myself out of bed, clumsy bear leaving its fetid den. Bleary, bumbling, still half
asleep, why do I care how much winter fat I lug with me into the dusty bathroom? It’s energy, after all. Better to fast and burn away these last blurry years and their subvocal
anguish, like the distant whistling of humpback whales. Better to lose the dull absence of mind, hippopotamus afternoons lost to the sagging couch,
trashy audiobooks, obsessive knitting, an old ostrich building herself an eggless nest.
I can’t do this, I say to myself in the dark nights of the soul when all of the world’s miniscule frustrations bunch under my skin to zap me with electric shivers
I can’t do this poetry gig anymore I can’t teach another class I can’t fish ideas out of my cobwebbed brain I can’t think of anything to say at the dinner table I can’t bear this 2 AM hour or this pain in my breast I can’t open Facebook or Instagram or The New York Times
And then somehow I fall back asleep and wake up, grumpy, sore, befuddled thinking: here I am again, and I guess I’ll just have to do it after all
