Get to the Midwest before communication is ruined by iPhones & all interactions are head-down no eye contact & the internet claims our sex—
like Borg outfitted with dildos introduced according to proximity—hey let's trade pics
& tissues of seed.
& because there is no sickness disease runs rampant.
O ye who are we who may wait until we bloat with Google detritus in pop culture gamma,
our down faces of digital pallor, scoliosis leaned screenwise,
not listening but scrolling on individual highways
with windshields very clean, but very small
that shrink into the expanding carinogenic Chase Bank blu-glo cloud,
our cocks less fleshlike, pocket pussies,
strap-ons slid from limp men,
we gestate from unseen ruptures at the bottoms of trash bags—
an island for them to weigh permanent
& dissipate chemical plumes—o we of seventy percent.
Our bodies process terabytes, synthesize faces from static.
Leave the coasts with walking lanes for texting & high heels in trash tornados & not knowing but friending monosyllables,
learning but fictions broadcast by satellites--
moons reflecting screen prompts of a subject’s dictation.
Clustered hives of humans,
the ocean’s bloody eyes reimagined into cliffs of silver trees that weep pixels of garbage
that swirl into the floating mass that encroaches coastal horizon.
Reports of sightings in the Bay Area over bites of mercurial fish.
<>
You were my online hook-up & you left me under the TV screen’s singing, in the organic hum of traffic & air conditioners, thousands of metal motors (all ringing refrigerators, fans, phones vibrating, cockroach clicks of hard drives), above the underground rumble of construction.
You left the caps lock on my keyboard & mopped up with my happy face t-shirt, walked out into Mario clouds on the Whitney’s wall.
Recall the grinding of our mustaches were different grains, rows of wheat between east & west,
humming transmission down corn-absorbed country roads behind us—
the hope in cicadas whose drone drowns our anxious drive from nature to finance.
It was all there for a moment; when you came you saw a window—not glowing but clear.
Well, you turned to your iPhone, walked through the sliding glass & left that small moment.
I don’t recall if we spoke in German or in English or in the ultraviolet hiss of department store security systems.
But the Bread Basket lies flat & Mongolia is hardly moving.
Old landfills now fear-based ski hills erupting with surveillance,
rise from grain pregnant cities spilling over with rats.
While the sun, diluted in haze, ripple in grass over genuine tassels whose ears are syrup, fuel, food fed to pigs fed to “polite” & “hospitable” people who float flimsy over the din of metallic others speaking of others,
the honest humidity free of synthetics.
Here only rivulets of contamination, shallow plumes of binary,
& phones one must still flip.
Imagine yourself anywhere else & fully present, without an icon below your eye.
Winged ants at the end of summer find a home in red earth.
The physicality of leaves, the droll, occasionally-realized, liberation of a driver’s responsibility, nothing but the sound of cicadas through windows unrolled
& butterflies smashing on the glass in front of you.
We are not yet pixels.
