Naugahyde seats crackle and groan under my knees, / sounds like taking shoes off at the end of the night, / when I remember that the first computer / was a woman named Ada Lovelace / who worked from home, mailing numbers to a Difference Engine

We walk in the firelight of foreclosed homes, / smoke thick as the ink of old contracts,

“Sorry, can I have a Woody Burger with cheese and a medium vanilla Chipper Chilly Chompachino?”

After a few cycles, the clicking ceases / The diagnosis / Determines what a disease is / Until you die, gnosis ----------- is only a thesis

If Venus were the moon / your voice would still / smell like gunpowder 

there’ll be snow on the tombstones, / snow and something else / soon enough

And these, / throwers of caution to wind / are guardians of fire; / the living; / marching shoulder to shoulder with death, / ahead of death, / still living even after with death. / And forever with the name / with which they lived. / Since decay / passes beneath the tall horizon of their memory, / hunched and shamefaced.

the wars that bind your plowshares to the capital of others /the wars that take you / the wars that break you / the wars that make you/ a little bit less / a little bit at a time

I see it in the folds of your hyacinth mouth / I hear it in the splintered syllables of your culling tongue / I’ll carry you with rough hands / across the waters / into nothing

Ungrateful of their blessing, They were. / And the hands insulted, humanity they cursed. / Since their rightful place, was not crossed on chest, / in bowed servitude.  / … And the fall began.

Here’s a shit in Warsaw, / flying the Polish flag, / the German in Bonn. / In Lyon the Tricolor / sticks up from the dump.

I’m almost positive that / I’m dying. / Don’t laugh. It’s not a joke. / I haven’t told my wife yet / and I expect, / at your age, / you should be able to keep a secret.

Where they hung the jerk / That invented work

His work is better suited / for panic attacks / than anything smacking of pride.

these parasitic hours sitting through the night

Free as black ants in a bladed line.

‘Hot roasted pigs will meet ye,

“Lay down your labors, good worker. 
Put off your boots and gloves. 
Enter, and be among your comrades whole.”

I heard scurrilous things: 
babies with two heads
locked in the attic,

exploit, object. St. Louis as beeswax, resin

You, from inside your  
publishing house of  
unearned income, 

Tenderness has no place here. / The long lineage / of gentle touch severed / by jagged images of the instant.

the whip crack from the snout of the gun / steel elephant blued / to a deep, desperate negative / stark against the snow

as we wipe our tears on stone altars

beware how delicately you wear / this crown of oblivion.

Working in that warehouse / Scanning Boxes by the rate / In Bezo’s dusty ass house. / I wish I was a rich f*g.

it’s too quiet, / too dead, / too ripped apart by sirens, / too veiled by the rot of concrete

What if you had taken a day off? / Read books in backyard jungles? / Enjoyed your coffee before it got cold?

we’ve imagined more / than this last night on earth / bent over grinding machines

you are the art / that hangs by strands