so I can touch you through the bars of the rain,

feel the obliterating clarity of skin,

feel whatever we can imagine together,

feel it till we finally understand

that when we die, the soul

leaves the body through the fingertips.

Jack o’ Hearts Shopping Mortmart

Mechotek music on the jukebox, Jack–

no savvy da lingo dere,

not down with the chops.

Caught in the corrosive scour of narcosis,

candled in the oxycodone light,

dropping them by the fistful, by the tub,

pain killer pills to keep you bearably numb,

because for the last decade you’ve been running

through the tunnels between dreams,

brain burning like dry pitch,

banging on every closed stone door

with your tin cup

so long now you

can’t remember what dreams are for

or when hope blinked to blank.

What goes down, is down, stays down.

Fear of the dark.

Of the whip, the grid, the rockets;

the robot milking your loins

for the last sweet drop.

Holy Shit

PART ONE: THE MANTLE OF CHAOS

Light is information without a message.

–MARSHALL MCLUHAN

1

We fueled up and finally got going so fast

we were jacking gas straight to the modems,

slamming electro dino-juice smack into our cerebellums

through a hot-wire skull hole

laser-tapped so the ’plug could be

torqued right down to the bone–

that way the internal combustion couldn’t blow

our bubbling brain jelly

all over the map of ashes

whose fine print (which nobody ever read)

said Stop!

Too late.

We couldn't.

Mile after mile

the ravaged fields fly by.

Now we know so much

that knowledge has overwhelmed knowing,

and discoveries come far too fast for reflection.

2

Too many dots in the logic-model

where making the dots be God was sort of the point

and connecting them

the generative force

for more dots you might want to make,

maybe to market as wild horses

mating in the timberline rain.

Blown out, sold out, worn out–

as if the electromagnetic field suddenly flickered, flipped,

or folded ass-side up

plumb into the vagrant slippage, slop,

and randomly relative pressure drops

which mark the shifting center of chaos–

for us, less a quantum flop

than a wanton leap that didn’t quite reach

even the edge of an Eden

almost reconstructed

from the original pieces

despite throwing away the instructions with the box.

We are left where we find ourselves:

maze-burned rats trapped in our carbon cages,

spinning in hyperdimensional domains

like biobotic protein strings

chained to the very dots we made

and every dot we find.

And yet we have amazingly remained

within hooting distance of the divine,

despite the spineless cynicism

and the mutilating irony of the age.

3

He turned fifty on a half-moon in early March,

and after a dreamless decade

–empty, inaccessible, or simply not memorable–

he dreamed, that birthday night, of the pocket

monster Charizard.

Loaded with fire, the ’Zard’s pyromaniacal spin

inflicted so many serious hit-points

on multinational capitalism