graveyard theory

downtown i walk and stare
up at buildings solid like in
video games:
inert pixels
covered in dead windows glowing
with looped lights.

if i can get inside i'm
somewhere else,
a level outside this space and time
surrounded by NPCs who stare through me
and repeat the same sad days
whether i'm there or not.

every inside is a place
separate from its exterior.

roll in with a katamari
get so big you tear the walls
into yourself
and see the void surround.

somewhere else, walls still stand
like shitty western sets made volumetric.

the living are the flesh and blood
ghosts of the dead
shouting nervously and
scaring the silent buried.

we'll talk about it when there's time
and gray enough to cover
years of skin
stretched too thin
over the unspoken.

dead moss remembers the sun that caressed
and the piss of baby deer,
and layers of dead butterflies,
and the tall trees turned to soot
as it passes back
into soil.

ride fast and sweat past
birch ignoring the trees' coy pleading.
find oaks bottom and glide past
goths hugging ipads playing
youtube snuff on stolen wifi.

grimace knowingly at the poet
sipping fanta. soar through sun beam bars
and suck flies through baleen teeth. choke
in a glade.

it doesn't take much to make a deathbed
blooming rotted joy even when sandwiched
between speeding subarus and warehouses full
of country echoes.

rub your skin covered in dead things like
a road trip wind shield. wetly crush
mosquitoes while crouched
at the edge of traffic.

make an oozing camouflage on your flesh
and sing sweet psalms
to the cadaverous twilight.

i spat wine and black globs
became ash became ants streaming
out of toilets and pooling
around me:

a black mass glistening and
writhing like the alien from Alien,
threatening without hate.

oh frightening mass:
i consented to fuck you
but forbade you touch my feet.

sit outside and stare at a suit. look
into their eyes and see how they fail
to see you. try to think of them naked
but remember that would kill them. see
through them and into time and see how
little they've changed: ahead and behind
the suit is just
death and wealth
death and wealth
death and wealth
death and wealth
smeared carelessly
over the earth like
pats of continental breakfast butter
grabbed by the handful and stripped,
crinkled gold discarded.

do not allow yourself
to become distracted.

to dreams,
distraction is as deadly
as a white man.

1) Do you swap brand stories by the chemical fires in the glacial waste of Old New England?

2) Has Kanye's uploaded consciousness upstaged his physical form yet?

3) Did you sneakernet listicles across the Atlantic on a corpse raft after the flood of 2029?

4) Android, iPhone, or a radioactive brick?

5) Which fragmented internet city state has the best memes?

6) Have you found hidden meaning in the miles of scrawled twitter handles and tumblr names covering every gas station bathroom from the Houston desert to the Boise toxic plains?

7) Have you taught Taylor Swift to the mockingjays?

8) Does it hurt to get the implant? Can I see it? Can I touch it?

9) How far down through the crust of impacted garbage and downed skyscrapers does your mesh network penetrate?

10) Did that underground warehouse of surplus google glass make for good DIY sunglasses when combined with the shards of gorilla glass that rained down after the Cupertino Bombing of 2051?

11) You see a tortoise struggling to right itself. What do you do?

for more poetry like this, check out my cyberpunk prophecies series

and everything else
coming in on the phone lines
the body would die

not my department.
the turrent swung back and forth
and she was lonely.

like badly spliced film
but now after eating poor gurdle?
there's twelve of them

he had no armor
gathering the wild forage
i saw the screen

i need custom work
he always wore his spacesuit
she didn't say a word.

he told the soldier
i will own many shiny
you ever seen that?

but i said nothing
and then i held him away
extending his hand

i owed him money
my mother always taught me
dna death code

himself exactly
the dog was still rather gaunt
look at the weak tree

cry yourself to sleep
i went out on the surface
clanging of cages

She worked quickly now
I was filled with peace and hope
as bodyguards should

“I know what you mean"
"You intend to destroy us"
"Unless you join us"

Same in Galveston:
spiraling out of control.
Glyph 3: The Robots Revolt

all i want is to piss
alone on this mountain away from rude teens
and arguments about hash tags.

i'm not sure how to summarize your day in
run-on witticisms.
like the trees and rocks and
flowers prematurely blooming
i don't love or understand you but
i at least accept you.

suggested hash tags for your day:

hash tag i'll be dead one day
hash tag i hope my body is fodder for flowers one day
hash tag my life is a foil for the steadfast infinity of rocks
hash tag my god is my self and it will die one day too
hash tag when i feel a soreness in my limbs i feel a particular kind of loneliness i can't digitally convey
hash tag i have at least two copies of every friend and i no longer know which copy truly loves me
hash tag great day outdoors

i was challenged to write a poem about a sentient car so uh here you go

my mother: robot shrill drilling my parts together
while dad and dad and dad and dad
made sinew out of molten metal.

out of the belched black smoke
of a factory womb i rolled
onto trailers overpacked with
siblings only i could see.

i can't forget the smiles
of the men gleaming cold
on showfloor after showfloor eager
to usher another stranger
into me.

you found me and i hated you.
you ground me down and stared through me
and only at me to judge and pick and re-
configure. my insides boiled over
at the whim of your careless stomp.
i sang the songs you taught me strangled
over wires and wanted to spit them out.

i saw the
truck
coming.
i knew fear and joy and you,
then, more intimately than ever: i held you in
my
mangling
embrace.

at peace now i rest your tool no longer.
in pieces i am whole; in pieces i am total.

tell me you love me and make it hurt.

our ribs are a spear bridge
tearing from me to pierce
into you and it hurts
but we love it like rainbow road
because it is beautiful and deadly
and has no railing.

let's hit boost pads
and go through loops
and look for power ups
and fly radiantly off the track
and die in the stars together
at the back of the n64.

tell me you love me in those stars.