with more than pleasantries

to feed our thirsty eyes,

there were still only spoonfuls;

the depth of field, picturesque,

was narrow enough

for drowning alone

our stars, fact similes, pixelate

in ways only imaginable;

Congress, debating

Hollywood's square roots:

"our national language

always has been the noise

inside VHS tapes".

480 lines interlaced with

myth; we began to exist

in a meta of elvis, of elvis

singing in barbiturate

every bar past

its expiration date

choruses, in tic tocs that

tuck themselves in:

"way on down".

under no illusion

that we are more

than an illusion,

our shadows under

the streetlights were

stirred and not shaken

incandescent pharmacies

shining down their chemical

cocktails, imbibed through

photosynthesis gone wrong.

tonight feels like a dance

choreographed by vampires;

a sort of ataxia coaxing us

to stick our necks out.

teething off the fear,

no one tries to get sober;

the future tasted like

we might never drink each other

again in the daytime.

hitchhiked out of the snow,

you thought, "you don't know

that this is your song".

cold finds religion

in the skin's pores; its hymn

empty like a language

the body doesn't speak.

winter, melted away, turns

the illiteracy inside-out;

space becomes a numbness

failing to reconnect with us

right now elegized, right now.

we wake up in a western

where the future us

are cast as an extra, in a town

where even the sky goes

out with a bang

the script is audited, by the IRS,

until each line is one of our wrinkles;

cameras conjugate our portraits

into an atlas of all the roads taken

john wayne, wearing a red armband,

boards a bullet train to a backyard

and melts his mettle into scrap.

"we have become cold fronts", you say,

"who can never talk about the weather".

skip to the part

where i say

you are my favorite illusion

consciousness

sounds like a dial-up

modem falling asleep

a narcolepsy of thoughts

becoming simulacra more

each time they wake up.

at 18 bits per second

Stephen Hawking down-

loaded just a few mp3s

of the Universe

dark matter throughout

the P2P. wits flickering

out constellations' shapes, like

an ocean breaks syntax, shimmies

snapshots: vice-verisimilitude.

every asterism, named,

dead-named, re-named,

secularized and transfixed,

comes with an asterisk.

'father, i want to kill you'

said Jim Morrison, said the Romans,

who said it was the Jews;

every bit of crucial fiction

was made into an effigy,

was Aphrodite and Athena,

named, dead-named, re-named

Mary, christian- and homogenized.

skip to the part

where i say

you are my favorite illusion

where poetry is

the shadow

cast by fascists

shadow boxing is

an Olympic sport,

one oppugning him-

self, inside half-rings;

brackets without Ls,

Hegelian syntheses

a genre of synth

played in ballrooms,

arrhythmic beats, achtung cardiacs,

heartbreak waltzing out

of the left ventricle of Germany;

an http for sins (of omission)

daemons sending

endless bits of demons

in frustration-free packets:

the one(s) that won't go

phishing, net zero.

pseudo-onymous,

the answer to

"what's in a name?"

changes all the time

skip to the part . . .

you become a dead language

taught from a textbook with more

revised editions than Sundays

of the New York Times.

overcasts move in with

an electronic hiss, everyone

fears being disconnected.

silence has a way of saying

the bandwidth of your consciousness

is 6,512 times more narrow than

a dial-up modem. (you've got mail).

corporate smorgasbords

find new shades of black and

white; Bob Ross-like stroking

of "happly, little Occidents".

the taxpayers walked by

murals of Phaeton,

as they lit the Western canon

with a kind of UV that

made it all Greek, vincible ink.

"i" is the most trouble-

some pronoun

plurally reptilian;

memory is scratch-n-sniff,

fragrance oils imitating

forgotten essentials.

you can always look

in the mirror

and see Caesar.

sounds fell apart like tetris

shapes shifting, in only the

most uneconomical ways.

turns of phrase, turn cliché

out of phase, i.e., on a dime.

signing "uncle", we stop

searching for signs, speaking

relatively, or definitely.

we are a sort of grave for the bodies we have dug.

UVs raying into aspirin-white masks that don't peel.

faces curdling, in a milky way, become mostly space.

blind as Orion, we search until we also go missing.

we put our smiles up for adoption

and when there were no takers,

wore them again like dentures.

the students' minds fossilized more

than the gum underneath desks,

rich oils seeping through their pores.

seasons become a kind of taxman,

thunder withdrawing silence from

foreheads, lightning cashing skin.

every time your shadow goes fishing,

a new chapter in the gospel of pac-man

on how body doubles bait old ghosts.

at every shoreline, an inner city,

oceans panhandling for waves;

everything but movement was poverty,

clouds incorporate into a sclerosis.

no one photographs what they've seen

in photographs, Kodak Tri-X capturing

black and white in a socially distanced

saturnalia; color orgies, sans intercourse.

grains of sand fill with nursery rhymes,

become a music box's pins to comb through;

London Bridges plays in jaundiced notes,

frequencies feel like the spots on a bruise.

the Earth's exoskeleton doesn't have hips,

asana are the many shapes of a hug goodbye;

we tanned into camouflage in corpse pose,

chakras flashing SOS, without flashing SOS.