Futures

a poem

In the new cities, nightmare is the policy.
Trapped and alert, each nerve-end gives birth 
to cameras and techniques, to bright red sets of data. 
Our eyes become a prism in which dreams deform.
Nothing is separate. Nothing withheld. All day long
we can puncture. We can eat the black, magnetic paste 
dripping from shattered bakeries. In the unglued streets, 
we can cite each stumble, each curse and flare, studying
windows sutured to the throat. A row of chalky vertebrae,  
a line of dead cars with antennae to breed and sing, 
sucking the ore from little tongues. They are in the sky.
They are in the city of Cortisol, of Phosphorus, of Force. 
They’re in the city of Gouged Out Sun, of Needles 
Pleading in the Dust. In the city of Human Corridors, 
a boy sleeps in a favorite nightmare hide-out. Beside him,
in a miasma of glitching, cathode aura, a president 
pries himself apart to show what remains of his face.
Distress signals oozing, sirens trapped screaming behind 
cardboard ribs, collapsed larynx, a tiny spastic heart. 
The battery dies. In the city square, we swallow ID cards. 
We wear a wire & repeat our lines: Nobody, nobody, none.
We watch the Trash Diviner, the Streaming Child. We touch 
the Stitches, the Gentle Shards, the Retrained Futures
shiny with grief and error. And the ending does not stop. 
We find a home inside it. We lay a sheet and pallet down, 
telling stories under the stars whose death no one believes.
And something wakes up every day. And it knows itself,
dreaming what the city undreams. It names each hour and shadow,
peeling away the wrapper, remembering every spill and braid, 
each silly hunch. And it stays for us—counting each stone, 
each broken key. Reading the blue entrails of the ghost.