Alex, who dances in Pre-Sim Spaces

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I hate writing poetry. I hate opening myself up to everyone here on Gather because it is conservative to say that ninety-nine percent of you will never get me, and perhaps that is best. This is Not a dig, its simply the truth. When I wrote Epistrophia’s Seduction, no one got it, then Daedalus published it, and I got letters from people I didn’t know, saying it was brilliant. Then American Poetry Review called and wanted to reprint my earlier work. Funny how that works. So to Alex, I write a little diddy which I should have written a long time ago. I hope he enjoys this.

I think I would continue with this Iago rapture (we know why of course, and don't you be disturbed by my recursivity this afternoon, blame fucking Tool), capture and cleave a UML diagram of my tequila dreams amid chartered zero byte waters. They submerge my cancelled heritage, which must needs empties itself of carbon horizons and kaleidoscopic deposits.  My heroes also outline the mechanics of our movie picture presence (but straight lo-rez:not HD, not yet. no), as though "to see" could possibly improve the pixels an impregnated clock defends within its waxing invisibility, returning me back to this ghost of Aaron. Time marches over erosion even wearing my round. Stones fall from my cliff-thoughts and ears until I can't even recognize the DETONATION. I once saw rain become water in mid-air, forgetting its falling habit (AND, for the briefest second saw my own wilted reflection blowed in the drop before it burst into vapor).  Today's no doubt another day remiss or pasture encloaked stillness, but still expansive, I feel, another outer foil parlayed within her presence but held aside looming in within my souls compiled chants.  I'd no other in my heart, but hearing is made another specific instance of what becalms me, you, or holds the distant waves within my own shimmering.  It's a fathom and instance for clinging vines no distance reams the door, your own hesitation diminishing here and there, but history is still a room away, and the open forums your imagined calling out for recognition are made aside no more retreat the flame returns and hears your names and dates remove themselves from the outer framer.   I waved around.  The further reaches of doubt are clearly explored but with a newer chance, with specific details made different, operating with success and fortressed out from the healer's claims.  The cars and others are not moving any more but are enfolded like my hourly substances calling out for their own recognition.  Here's the day again, and mine own name is still a flamer en retard, my own airs so far from removal that the reminiscence of vocabulary is still intense.  The more fortunate of the remaining peasants still their own voices to secure the safety of an imminent future.  What is held aside, hope for instance, is the residue of history encrypted within the being of a prophet's vision.  No hourly fortunes are welcomed here.  There are far more empty cans than sacks to contain them, and in the sentence itself there are suggestions about where the true energies might lie and ignore refusal.  The benign doubters stall around, marking out their own rhythms with word-choice inhabitants in their own collars, but the fuller gaps are made of light itself, satiated like a claim for espousal.  I'd make these rotations claim their own space.   Here the faster scores recall; in less random alluvials, mine own matter forges a leaner score than you might imagine.  The definitions themselves are cloudy but intense, in tents or otherwise, sensations heaved from one room to another; but the mediatron, furniture and home-security system and so forth, have their own placement within the imagination of my walls, the house itself a Forger of Latent Claims, a denied multi-frame, but bleating light-hearted flips and balances from the tinder board within its own shell.

Fucking Bleating, man.

 To Alex

When I asked Alex to define pre-Simulation,

he avoids referring to colors: neither the rich pink orange of salmon flesh,

nor the soft electric green of a lime, nor dark red of human blood. 

The ashen strips of his linens offset the appearance of darken red objects:

fire, coral, and the cinnabar that bleeds its ink into the creases of Alex's palms. 

He places blank clay paper in a clay pot and inscribes it with the word robot;

In time, even the yellowing of the leaves will be dampened by darkness of his soul. 

In time, his light will pass through the space of a room to a perfect white circle on a screen. 

In time, each color will appear at the border between light and dark, with or without their objects.

But now he stumbles from the mouth of the tomb under a canopy of trees thick as cordwood. 

He whispers the word vellum in a tone no one can hear. 

Belief, he will later say, is a line between hunger and animal, or apple and apple-colored fruit. 

Nothing, he will say, is green, or as green, and nothing is greener -- or less real than the simulation.

And so, he dances. A horah to self - a horah to all of us. Spinning round and round and perhaps even there, we find some foresaken meaning.