If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.
Fanny Howe
Another historic blizzard in Boston
Where all the history is
In Washington they can’t get a background check through
Some kind of supercop copkiller
Casts from Hollywood, his manifesto so hot
Traffic goes glacial at the border
The LAPD hasn’t changed since Rodney King
if you’re going to buy a pair of pants make them tight
enough that everyone will wanna go to bed
You can’t even measure the snow total
It whips around like the zooms
Blood diamond drills
The loneliest girl in the whole damn town
A rough sketch of a good sketch
Smack in the epicenter the news is creaming about
Word, sentence, word, sentence, word, line, word
A partitioned public segments demonstrations
therapy fluffies help too.
Up Google Drive a solar path sings on
LEDs on a boulder bear where lunch is consumed
commonspace for collective flatulence.
But down that path a car
learns to steer itself same way I steer,
eyes at ten and two—scuttle to the shuttle
back to the medical center, back again,
a hundred earbuds arranged unphased,
50 smartphones swyped full of racist vernacular
and a billion jingles permitted to shuffle.
Hate poems, in the name of language
To be restrained in the core of the sun
A shitload of shit
Every other other is available
Skipping through the lasertag of the TJ margin
Balanced ambivalence is good for the core
So what pigeons step from their stone ledge
Idly munch the weather you ordered
Vacation pills for all entrepreneurs
Subtlety the suntan
Ignore Capital’s memory and not your love
Later—if you’re a good client—
You’ll sleep safe like a man on his gun
Even after you have awoken
You who are for anything that jerks on your nerves
You check the box, I check the box
Bing-ing fertilizer in the marine layer
These poems are my taxes I write
Everything off even the security door I purchased
To signify children and death
It’s mostly gravy, hoodie and boots
You in your pronoun you haven’t unpacked
Another cardboard clamshell
So let’s donate the donuts
We couldn’t ingest to the veterans
We admire. Just get a receipt, history
Swigged a faceful of ink
Begging, I admit it, I needed a drink
Well, I feel I hopped over a racecar
It’s always the middle of the clock
When sharks play it straight, a peccadillo
in bridge, as in bridge-bombing.
Sometimes I outsource identity to you device
For the good of society
Fondle my reflection in your operating system
Check the humidity. Phonetic pleasure
Of a million million forbidden fruits, trochaic
trachea bridle I choose your compound heads
Intimacy kits can’t sheath the application
From the interface. Weep on the window
And wipe with a microfiber stocking
Expensive success. Luxury tax
We all have our little cyborg glitches
I just want you to tell me where
everyone needs to eat, open now, 3 or less $ signs
Meantime you’ve writhed out of your cracked cover
Revealing your birthmark inscription
Designed in California. Assembled in China.
Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing them.
Being raised near the nuclear plant spoiled me
For cheap sunsets and beautiful power
Ditto LSD and LOL, all shriek electron
Loss.
It takes great genius to exploit stereotypes for profit,
The only art is transparency failure,
Whatever that is.
But what wilt thou, body, do
To deploy my body again?
Please please like like some colors—
The flesh against the anthill—
Body by Monsanto.
The wind blew bills from a chainmail bag
Every currency in circulation
Doing the ghost.
My job made page work wage work
alien stepchild. He weaves Ethernet
all day, it’s highly unethical.
A concept fails
only in incompletion
in its undone (predacted prenditioned)
dark geography
one inconceivable conception?
Addicted to abandon sounds, signs.
You want to be disowned, most, but jones
to be, as well, pure warm form,
placental, revolutionary, canonized, and in it
which mainly depends on download speed, not distribution.
No money left for space opera,
or cybertherapy, but translating Fanny Howe
into myself demonstrates that
territory and cloud storage
function as relic assumptions betwixt the conjoined.
Tongues. This must be why I bought
the paddleboard and then put it down
in the basement. The ocean is the horizon
as is the sky, none of it when it is!
and Fukishima filling it all in.
I stood on it once, my knees slightly bent,
as a plane roared for Japan,
out of view.
Never stay at an all-inclusive resort undergoing
Brand change if you are reducing
And clammy with 1st
World shame. Rosetta Stone, tip tactically
Immortalize by creating your own weight
In Styrofoam
Better Believe! That nature is cute
And infringing on the backdrops of multiselfies
If the Baja peninsula is really making wine
What is value
ojos de serpiente, el dos de picas
Refugees from the polar vortex come to
San Diego concerned about drought, how
your water isn’t enough
In the casino, a rain dance
Google snow glows upon the coast
coats the vagrants on the bridge, angel makers
Each word I looked up each time
It appeared for example planet begat earth
From the dropdown thesaurus
But it lacks precision
In the sense of two finites and what is
The synonym for thesaurus not these choices
Your friends will like that you made new friends
Between Los Angeles and Tijuana today
But I say, Vacate your position
Atomically, and you’ll know what wealth is
You’ll have some words
Process Note: Google Drive is a word-by-word rewrite of Fanny Howe’s Robeson Street, from the book of the same title, published in 1985 by Alice James Books. The first four poems from this project can be seen at The Brooklyn Rail.