Ice Shelves
Ice shelves set to break apart in high definition.
The universe as two-dimensional hologram.
Light glinting frantically off and on
the wrinkled surface of a pond, the names
of things appearing in subtitles while
visiting the text in a dream of an ideal language.
Its words are English, the language is not.
What makes it ideal is its perfect clarity,
how it reveals to us exactly why we make
our consumer choices in a world ablaze
with freedoms, where the definition
of talent is being true to yourself, where legends
live on among accolades and superlatives
and continue to inspire and show us what’s great…
So instead of noise, constellations of sound,
uncanny pronunciations, like dreaming in color.
A Day With Fine Angles
That voice on the radio upstairs hints
at a way to make sense of lines
that have the eerie, seductive
ring of the inevitable. Hype
washes it away, the signal, a kind of
tangent, circular in its flight
across these gilded skies
in a time when fact will strike the reader
as superfluous. But how
can you tell right now which one,
standing out there on the ledge,
wants to be saved and which one
wants to fly? The sacralizing mind’s
on fire all the time
like hot glass blown full of air—
and yet again we’re forced to trust
the description as being accurate
and we’re unlikely to know
where it is not. But the idea that some of our words
are missing or might’ve been erased
disturbs us, keeps us up all night
and away from the snowier summits
of consciousness that we’ve somehow
exchanged for this game, where
our trajectories almost almost intersect.
Correlative Shadow Tone
On the eve of the Mayan Apocalypse, 12/21/12
On the day before the day it all ends
there’s no waiting. Snow
swirls sideways in parentheses with us
(here) immersed in the wonder
as if a new word was about to be spoken.
The word, its horizon continually
and unevenly moving away, intimate
wreckage, characters
in hieratic white space fracturing—
this is what we have, many lives
but most are unlived
or lived by someone else. Negative
beliefs can, by default, cast what you don’t like.
Unless the glass is opaque,
the glint only a figment, then nothing.
Say, we breathed this soot
and formed ourselves from it, say
in a universe of no delete ducks and mimes.
Part of a line coheres behind us.
Tonight, there’s no escaping the frame.
Confiscate The Number 5
They make it speak differently, ad hoc.
Jangling new coins in their mouths like that
sounds like hear or there. Like a bleep.
Seven across: cracked the famous Houdini code.
They made it speak with little to no punctuation.
Yes, and picked all the best nouns in public
but not hollyhocks, lavender or wheat.
This, says confiscate the number 5. You
say it and the saying makes it true
such as the word vector meaning
like a tic, or how there can be many even
when the word looks singular, which is
also felt when it is heard. The semantic
range of “Forget your best adventures”
makes no sense. All quotations are approximate.
Like marks on a screen too blurry to be read—
Ten years is long enough to wait. (Tic or tick?)
In the mirror, the candle is white and remains lit.
Talking Points: The Eies Of All People
Yes, they got it all teed up—
glass shattering, the eies…
Up passed the layers of city architecture
reflected in a glass tower.
Thus mere light is pleasing to the mind.
A shiny city upon a hill shining
like it does in movies or on the news,
stronger than oceans, built
soe that the riche and mighty
should not eate upp the poore…
The word stock of urban life,
its shrill heat and crowd noise,
a single thronging unified
in one augmented reality
like the radiant nostalgia of the olde ballpark.
In the verbatim transcript, it says
nor the poore and dispised rise
upp against and shake off theire yoake.
A tall, proud city humming commerce…
Today the eyes of all people are truly—
