Amphora

Cosmo-Futurist Nurse Log 

Overheard at the KSW Colloquium in Vancouver

​

“I put the God 

in glaze, but isn’t 

technology evil?” 

or a ‘see reverse’ 

of feeling inhering 

aversal. Ghost-fordist 

underlined and struck-thru. 

“hella animals, 

leave your hills”, & 

sculpting down I follow, 

fleeing inconvenience 

into hyperlinks 

“The Internet of Things” 

streams like a dream, 

what’s seen thru a stuttering screen 

turns how everything seen is. 

This twisting has a pleasant feeling 

a subtle misaffection, 

it says 

to a glass – “pour” 

into discrepancy, 

describes into wrung hands. 

I don’t have anything to say 

that isn’t obvious. 

You look from the faded 

tones numerous in 

wet white fields 

that flicker between handwriting. 

Creative professions playing frisbee 

on the sustainable park lawn. 

 

“I have ethical issues” 

but it’s hard 

to try 

harder than that, 

the game’s gains are momentary, 

a fortuitous bounce 

in the untied stakes of amnesia 

during an affliction year 

we rhetoric to keep. 

This rings ajar in the ear. 

“Depend on proof or faith” 

both’re scummy & commodious, 

this city’s housed, 

their absent body’s decomposition. 

You want a tattoo of yourself 

showing your tattoo 

to others, I repress 

licking the sweat 

off your plans 

(I don’t even like you), 

but in turn, 

I do this fun thing: 

jump off a badass building 

for people. Red Bull. A falling 

forward in every frame; 

dream highways to yesterday’s futures. 

I saw a conversation between 

one person and his phone. 

Two dark forms in darkening 

repetition. 

And then I saw the horizon 

Lit before the keel 

 

Branches Without Limits

 

Alone, my isolated maturity 

limps through loopholes, paralyzed 

by the first fruits of long boots. 

You will need further steps to cross an ocean: 

Even the engulfment stretches unmeasured 

like the freshest ricegrounds in 

a swamp teeming with securities, or 

a tropical equity for the prince 

of plants. A house without shortage grinds nine 

generations to cloth. Feverishly, 

the canals tramping through the glades. 

We emerged looking different from when we entered, 

when before tore at our every muscle and sinew. 

The serpent in her agony 

absorbed every drop of venom, 

but it only quenched a slight degree 

of her thirst for living sleep. 

On night shift, you suffer some who sleep unwell 

or do without, their line could be drawn 

over iron-heavy eyelids ruined 

to make steel, a pretext smelting. 

Like pottery moulded empty, pulmonary, 

our machine was always generous or worse. 

Last winter I used to cry with sore feet 

to and fro through snow for I could not leave 

it to stop. Oil to the wheel, intellect 

of thieves, agitator against the night, 

I rolled a sack under me, another 

rolled up as a pillow, I sleep few hours, 

every evening belonging to the next 

morning. 

Revived by supplies of coffee, 

I dragged myself from a squalid bed, 

 

telling day from night by the light’s sparks 

before the sun. This guiding star is your lead. 

With sun in hand, panting for revenge from the light, 

fanatical automation punched through the day, 

an avalanche of encroachments wrung shrewd 

from the stunning noise and turmoil, halting 

before pleasurehounds, their legions suffering 

on pivot’s swindle, to fall like gold 

from a showerhead. 

Their shortened string 

lengthens into a mess of dark intervals, 

noon meat in winter, at ease with leaves 

Like disease, leaving us weakly untouched, 

We have been cradled completely. 

 

Heaving the Paving 

​

We were then shattered into grief by a dismemberment fiasco. All the people were there: the ruling jackals, the real-estate moguls, upper management parrots, lynx-eyed plutocrats, stock exchange sharks, protectionist eagles and bullish free traders, priests and progressives, young whores and old nuns, and even small business owners - what other kinds are there? An open revolt against the abjectly powerless that risked nothing. 

Imagine, living a week 

off a reputation for citation 

and emerging sufficiently obstinate, 

with a trite remark in your mouth. Adage 

for adversity, debt against leisure, 

your blunt ingenuity would drudge at 

any common good to dissolve it while 

extirpating paupers in asylum’s 

walls. Neat. An ideal withers for your show. 

The flesh angels appear without their hands, 

thronging, stunted and unripe, 

their bones lock jawed, half-starved 

of discharge from abscesses, cobwebs, dead 

black beetles, putrid yeast, its stomach baked 

ill-shaped, ill-formed, and bloodless, 

a shorter body in soil, one kept from 

the light of breath is best, so says 

the measureless drive pressed to vital lengths. 

In horror, you cling to letters so you don’t have 

to look, you stay unregulated - but cooly disdain 

a cloud of circulars in protest. 

yet tribunals of introversion tell you 

that nothing is amiss - summoning yourself 

before yourself for commendation - can a bench 

of farces ever be fallible? 

So say the stipends of longing. 

The wilder the rage of the mob of managers, 

the more soothing the noise of commercials 

in agitation, the more a child will lose 

its nerve to enter adulthood, throwing 

 

all eight of her years beneath the wheels 

of operation. 

Let the young drudge through refreshment, 

their time teems with impossibility, 

while the old and scandalous blossom 

unpunished. Footed with children, the mothers 

stoke fires with no fantasy, 

but the struggle to wake from one, Being owed 

eight years retrogression as concession. 

Bringing them belonging with pleasant names, 

the gilded pill is given, and they are 

bidden to burden in stone-like veils, 

their privation portions dwindling, 

silk howling on stools, seignorial 

for the lightness of their fingers. 

They lurk in the background, resistant 

yet hand-in-hand, the weakest eyes 

became bleach and dye, 

lace and stockings, earthenware 

and matches, percussion-caps, 

cartridges, carpets and fustian cuttings. 

Shreds of enforced idleness, attraction 

hounded through scattered sheds 

as an actor for an uncommented cameo, 

the unctuous heart dripping with 

the milk of kindness, enriching 

the highest exchequer. 

Enthusiastically seize meaninglessness. 

Reduction is the function of seduction. 

 

Beefliver on Mangoes 

​

Or cantaloupe enveloping a squash 

In day undo the dirt 

underneath numb nails, they 

hold holes where 

carrots and turnips 

were, their contour 

like a rhinoceros horn. 

Looping the hollows of swiss 

her night-blind eyes rattle 

with a butter-starch rasp. 

A sigh rides the bus 

like wrapping’s gloss, 

It’s seeping out, 

you’re nearly seen. 

Velvet buds under the sheer scarf, 

her ears pressed to the window, 

podcasting new old supplements. 

Deficient bones flake like stones, 

feeling like a failure, pharmacy 

deliver me from funk. 

On the bottle’s unproven jacket 

the hiker’s hair cascades.