My Robot
My robot comes to me in the night afraid of death. I tell him he is a young robot he will not die for a long time. I pick off the magnets that stick to his chin, oil him, tickle music out of his chest with a tin spoon as he laughs in even intervals of two seconds. Each night I hear him up watching Spanish soaps, he never sleeps, volume turned low out of kindness.
My robot lives only a year. The humidity rusts him apart. In death, he is tiny. I place him in a shoebox and bury him in the backyard beneath his favorite orange tree. I spear the TV antenna into the earth over his grave. A ripe orange wobbles and falls. Its fast Spanish breaks on a kiss.
REM Desynchronization with Hypnopompic Hallucinations
The feedback works this way—
UFOs, X-files already intravenous
of the oft-seen scaries,
you are, one night, in your dreamspace
in your yellow spacesuit:
its umbilical drift: breaks
and you tumble—slowmo—away
and, static of brain-glitch,
(melatonins unhinge)
wake to huge weight, paralyzed
in same void (contra belief, in space
don’t freeze or boil but
suffocate, slowly—“air leaving
the lungs due to enormous pressure …”)
twisting your pupils thru
half-opaque visor to see
bed, table, and lamp, floating
there with your darkwalls
star-punctured in a conched nebula.
Then comes the solar wind’s
sea-eerie song, then light spins
blinding droplets off ice-slender rings …
Next day seize a pamphlet
on abductions—and it’s minted your
slim creed. Clutched by the need
to explain it, quickly, as Others,
as in Fuseli, his Nightmare
where the monsters seem
like second-thoughts: the small
incubus stares at us perched
on his blonde-victim splayed
dramatically back—her back
arched to breast-mounds,
left hand deliquescing—
fingertips to the floor—a bit
pouty holds his green hand
up to wart spackled chin—
is she for real? While marehead
gapes from shadows, hopeful
(if a bit slow) white eyes
and nostrils lambent only
from the girl’s luminous skin
and gown—light glossing
as if of same importance
the objects roundspread—
redcurtains, mirror
and phial in orbit of her
permed starlight, her curls and
flimsy gown that clings
sticky its luminous twines
to her legs, condensing
from clouds of proto-
galactic gas and dust to this
spine-bending pleasure.
This is the moment she expands far
with black horizonless space
until in Zippo’d click of fusion
her extinction is born
as light shudders and jams
inside. If it were only
a black-eyed pale-fetused
space creature, or demon
of Jupiter’s red-funneled eye,
only a quasar or quaalude,
and not her own brilliant
strangeness, its crushing weight
astrolabed, brain-wild in math—
If she were only incubus, not
immaculate, filled she would not feel
this ecstasy—nor scribble later
in the longfiles of names hers for
not me really, for truly separate
that accrete from each country:
alien, mara, Mottaka, dukak
our faithful one, lover: our death.
There is a pause in June
There is a pause in June.
The landscape brightens further than May,
the air fills with the distant traffic, and that is all.
The weeds continue,
stand tall in patches
scattered throughout
the bricks.
The bricks continue,
solid, massed for catching light, holding just so much
giving off warmth in a hum
well into darkness. Evening.
•
There is no apotheosis, no surfacing. This moment: where the weeds
grow so tall and the bricks grow so bright:
•
where the eye,
beholding,
cannot tell which
—weeds or bricks—to draw its pattern from
•
is lost
in the months that came before, and no click, no trumpeting
for this is the pause
these are the days before accepting
that this is all—
these long days spent still anticipating some spectacle,
down in the sun.
Trap Poem (Villanelle and Echo)
Each one spins a lovely cage:
the go-go dancer, in high strobe-sweat,
flings her shirt through bars—we smile and age.
Have you seen bars descend around the stage,
joined as hands of rippling bills exalt
arms flexed to wings, atop the cage,
that fall—dark veins onto the beaten face?
Or sung from history’s endless list of bets
how best odds rattled down just old age?
As the penguin staring at the painted surge
strains to see, to feel the wet,
and does not turn his head as down his cage
from a door in mountain-sky emerge
caretakers with silver, writhing nets:
but stares at paint that has no age—
so if our bodies opened this moment as we gape
at sun and breachless moon, and vault
of sky, our first and last and lovely cage,
we would not notice, just smile and age.
As the sea eagle perching in outdoor cage
does not look up when lightning bursts
and drops come down through the veined sky-nets
to touch its folded wings with a sweet damage—