Evening Song

I am falling in love at a great distance.
I am using a non-Euclidean telescope.

An ant traverses the motherboard of a supercomputer.
I saw this in a movie.

The night sky looks a lot like one would expect it to.
The night sky sounds like? Feels like? Tastes like?

The night sky is as big as the Internet.
There is a procession of ants moving across it.

I am falling in love with a great distance.
It feels like a river. It tastes like smoke.

Through a Keplerian telescope, the sky is clearer but inverted,
the way it is in memory.

The ants have started nervously to wander.
They aren't sure what they're doing here.

You were always one to ask a lot of questions.
I will sit silently on my hands until morning.

Long, Long, Long

Your mother is driving, or
maybe your ex-girlfriend. The road
makes a sound like your fingers
in your ears. You are warm, and
the window feels like a cold palm
against your palm. It is black
water. It is the pupil of a dark eye.

She begins, softly, to sing
along with the radio. You hadn't
realized it was on. It is
a Beatles song, one you know
you should be able to place. Pretty
and short. It stops, she stops.
The car keeps humming forwards.

It is raining. You are on the edge
of sleep. Every few seconds,
a brightness rushes past.
It is an irregular heartbeat.

Slideshow

The trees are dark and
vertical. They make a distant
wall. Somebody says
something, then repeats
it more slowly.

*

A girl with dark hair
is talking. This bassline
is too loud. The conversation
drops another semitone, you feel
a bit sick to your stomach.

*

A half-empty glass gets
knocked off the railing, it makes
a dark star on the rocks
below. You start to make a pun
but decide against it.

*

You feel like a projection
against the house. The girl
next to you peels her shadow
off of you. Something
smells like urine.

*

You are breathing very fast.
The smell is bad; the sound is bad.
Someone confuses you
with a part of his body.
The song starts over again.

The Negatives

None of the clocks here agree with each other.

You look like a drummer; let's start a band.

They began to murmur in unison. The shadow

of the ceiling fan scraped the wall

like a tongue picks at a sore. Radiohead

were playing a concert in the basement, well,

really just one song, over and over.

They had to call the dogs on them. I like

the way you forget things, or set things

on fire. The click track was out of control.

There was a story behind this, wasn't there?

You used to tell it to me to make

my teeth fall out. No matter—the window

is black water, a dark eye

with thin ripples expanding across it, and

you're coughing like a busted amplifier.

reflex

Sonnet 3

Everything is too big when seen in silence
through a window. In this room I am
a goldfish in a bathtub, and the bathtub
is full of alcohol. I see my reflection
in the bathtub or the window; I look
like a fish. I look like a sad fish. The sound
outside the window could be birds or distant
televisions. I take off my glasses
then refill them. It smells like gasoline
in here; how can I sleep? I climb outside
and look for something I can set on fire.
There are Christmas lights or candles in the sky.
Midnight is a sad bus quickly arriving.
I can see you through the ringing in my ears.

a sestina that doesn't totally suck!

Chicken

At 10:00 the sky is full of feathers.
A train leaves Chicago at 60 MPH
heading west. In Washington, the President orders
fried chicken for dinner--he's eating late.
A boy sits in an apartment in St. Paul
playing a computer game against the Internet.

The evening sky is as big as the Internet.
The President imagines that the feathers
are still on his chicken. A storm heads for St. Paul,
winds gusting up to 40 MPH.
The boy reacts .14 seconds late
and gets fragged. The conductor orders

an emergency stop in Milwaukee; the President orders
an escalation in the War on Trains. On the Internet,
it never seems to get very late.
At 1:00, the boy respawns, thin feathers
of latency flickering around his online image. His St. Paul
body is oblivious to the hour.

The train has now been stranded for an hour.
In Washington, there's a mixup in the orders,
and the President launches a missile at St. Paul.
Meanwhile, all across the Internet,
a new fetish is springing up: chicks with feathers
instead of genitalia. The boy starts to think it's late

at 3:00, but he doesn't disconnect. Too late,
the President realizes where he's sent his 700 MPH
bird of death. The train starts off again, smooth as feathers,
and the crew brings round trays of free hors d'oeuvres
to placate the passengers. An anonymous Internet
figure, with an IP nowhere near St. Paul,

hacks the Pentagon and redirects the missile from St. Paul
to Washington. It can't change course so late
in flight, and explodes midair. Thank heavens for the Internet.
The train too arrives in St. Paul, over an hour late,
but there. A tired girl gets off and orders
a taxi to the boy's place. He thinks she feels like feathers.

The President orders a preemptive strike against the Internet
at 5:00. It's finally getting late here in St. Paul,
where feathers are falling at 120 MPH.

the poem that won't die or fit anywhere

Frequency

You are flat and hard and distant enough for words to echo off
of. When we say the same thing at the same time the world
becomes our vibrating
champagne glass. We are Tesla's collapsing buildings,
making window frames with our fingers that break when we
want to hold
anything. I am made of cells, discrete and crystalline
and membranes that burst predictably occasionally like solar
flares. They resonate
to words like astrology victims. Hearing you or hearing myself
reflected in you, I become a thrumming million, multiple
like the grass
blades that stretch up to the little sun like tongues.

small song inspired by dinosaur comics

Fugue

I would rather live in a mirror
than on camera. My reflection looks
better than I do. I think the uncanny
valley principle applies to poetry. My
reflection thinks the Heisenberg Uncertainty
principle applies to poetry. I don't know
what that means, but it sounds nice.
My reflection says that he could pluck
your heart from behind your ribs. I hate
it when he brags. My reflection has
a small hole in the back of his head
that I'm not allowed to see. I don't want to.