Perhaps this is the ‘now’ I have attended. Dreams mean nothing when the machine that can record them has settled into rust only imagination and the sun and X-rays can reassemble. I can’t remember my dreams because I am a brkn mchn. Sliver of mercurial glass! slide into my foot! assert yourself, the cold remains of another broken miracle. As a species we taught water and glass and steel to lie flat, hold still and do our will. When mirrors break it always feels like a failure. The mirror is inseparable from the eye. Parasite or epiphyte, the half-mirrored child appeared at a whim, then hardened into quotidian slots AND LONGER, hard seats in the ER smoking outside in the snow as far away as you can so’s not to bother the person you got a smoke from, standing someplace you won’t make shittier by weeping. There was nothing ambiguous about that moment, when I started to loathe flowers. Pretty flowers, death shorn and hacked is what you are – I see you in your unobjectionable patterned paper. What discipline will bring us flowers in the future; where will barley grow for beer? Everything good and decent is far apart and kept that way as fear and boot heels force their alarms into the collective breath. Carbon dioxide ratchets up, with it anxiety; it wasn’t in the syllabus; we’re conspiring in the dragon’s exhalation now – this is a vapour fit to kill.
Extracurricular Incoherence (new poem)
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Written in response to a poem by David J. Dowker, and riffing on its vocabulary, (rather than mood and intent) originally it was in stanzas. When I lost the formatting, trying to get it to stop putting line breaks where I didn’t want them, I thought, ‘you know, this is better; it reads as a continuous fever dream/rant and it suits the mood and purpose of the poem more effectively.’ I never know when my laziness will serve me. If anyone asks I’ll post it in the original format.