Two Poems

I Am Immortal

All emotion is pleasure. Remember that.
Hard for me not to fanboy over you.
Your robot eyes flickered a violet
and marshmallow hue that seemed
to chide us. It was just a little
harmless virus. Rain and fire
wimpled decal stickers stuck across
the video game box. So the hero must
travel seven ages to repair
          the seven
                    cosmic
                              clocks.
                                        The spread
of opiates and other exogenous shocks led
to a rise in what we term deaths of despair.
Basho wrote with pine needles in his elbow
and lice in his hair. Celebrating 5 years
sober, he spilled his lime and Topo Chico,
saw the sky crust over
          the first summer of streaming video—
sword fighting, broken jaws, kraken-chains
of The Quickening.
          This isn’t a joke, Richie.
                    I am immortal.
                    I remember everything.

04:36

been paying much attention to this story

04:39

uh not a ton but i am aware

You were so excited about the Millennial Fair,
you didn’t sleep, did you? The term legacy
from legacy software described
the city as obsolete, unsupported technology
          (that fine similarity
          between
                    the printer driver
                    the cloud puddles
                    the dirty cat feet).

                    As we were walking
the smell of yeast pushed down through the air

wrinkling the pages of your character sheet.

O clement,
          o loving,
                    o one
                              true love
                              and sweet!
You, the young, quick-talking, petty thief,
told me:

          Going to Burger King
          and ordering Beyond Meat
          doesn’t exactly
          make you a priest.
                              Okay?

                                        Okay.

you say
we’ve  know   each  other   a   decade but
immediately  I   think   18 years   because
I’m   counting  because   I   crashed   at   a
house in   Riverwest   you   helped me find
sheets   when  I came back at 5 a.m. found
myself   drunk   in a  stranger’s linen closet
and   you   held   my   arm tight and closed
the   door   so   no   one   would   wake up
from the light

This old man stopped me outdoors
at the exercise equipment
at Washington Park saying
he had many belts.
Kung Fu, he said,
had made his fingers strong.

Punch like this, he said.

Fingers out.

Think Bruce Lee. A one-inch punch.

                    Now.
                              At the same time.

                                        Put your hand here.

                    Ready?

                    We’ll punch at the same time. Ready.

                    Now.

                                        Phoom.

                              I hit you in the throat first.

Look at me: 82 year old man.

And your adam’s apple’s crushed.

An oak savannah gives way to stubble field.
Sparrows startle as the rat terrier wheels
and finds a dead heron, bones barely
decipherable from yellow grasses.
The Lake was gone, the river still ahead.
How did it get here?
          The wading bird dead
                    so far from water.
                              A minor mystery
                              I almost missed.
                    My pocket shaken
          as a friend texts: Ian McKellen
Teaches Cookie Monster to Resist.
 
Georgics I

What happens next depends on which edition
you read. This one will tell how the gods
and goddesses devote themselves (and like some
political parties, their rescue mission is to seek
a mission to keep rescuing). It will tell how
a child stands at the screen door thrown open
in the wind and howls once into the street
the name of the storm. It will tell
of a skeleton hand on a laptop sticker
with its fingers extended in the the ‘hang ten’—
and how those autocomplete fields
having twice felt the sun, and twice now the frost
will shatter in one season the storehouses
with the full weight of harvest.

                                        It will tell how
if I want to move truly slow enough
to read, I must cry out at the exact moment
I go on. I’m asking you, in other words,
to keep your sound on
                                        and fields grateful
for their rest will bless you the following year
and wake us from my reverie as I hear
craft address craft, bartender to barista
who in flirty singsong says the word “recession.”
They just need to survive the summer,
he says, and then it will be Christmas,
the New Year, and so on.
                                        Sei Shonagon
asked if people tire of cherry trees—
and answered herself, no, not even
                                                  if they blossom
the same every spring. They never dull.
Medieval scholars believed God wrote O M O,
Italian for man, on the eyes and nose of the skull.
Depending on your perspective, the decay of flesh
revealed the word of God or the name of man.
Either way, scholars agreed, it was written
in Italian. They that watch for the morning,
as it says in the Psalms, wait with the purest
disappointment until a flash in the east
reveals itself on the near side of the trees—
a calm, a rumble, a title screen—as the leaves
glow with the 60-second trailer for
a new season about to be released.