i.
neon lights flutter nervously
in the oily sky
in predictable dystopian fashion
an interminable flow of men coalesces and
like sand particles scattered by the water jet of
light, disappears again, back into
bubbles of silence converging and dying
screams fill the air
an undertone of whispers beneath
she flickers into existence under the green, yellow, pink beads
dark skin under uv lights
and surveys the scene—all as
expected. She ticks off
neat ink-jet printer
boxes of experimental input in her mind
and sits down, ignoring the damp,
fades away fiercely.
ii.
he needs to find her.
A scientist, grasping nervously
At his bag
(it’s a satchel)
Defending himself mentally against the sleazy
Greasy stream of unsanitized life,
Fluttering like the unholy wings of a moth,
The legs of a semi-anesthetized caterpillar,
Right against his ear
he needs to find her;
his money is running out
(well not precisely his money)
So thus it’s more like…his life
he needs to find her;
For life, he has heard, is her trade and her dealing.
iii.
A blue day
light pokes the thick filthy smog
like an annoying sibling
dismissed (but not quite)
with a slap of the hand
car alarms wail
a woman leans against a trash can (was she there before?)
a sheaf of white papers on the other side
a rusty paperclip
strangles ideas into a coherent body
but the wind picks the sheaf up
laughing, she chases it,
freely frizzing hair
blowing in the wind of other worlds
and pins it with a flying foot
leaps and rolls, hard, in a moment of forgetfulness
beads of red blood absorbed by her hair
matted against concrete
and stands back up.
Checks the world. All normal. Vanishes.
iv.
he waits at the garbage can
every night in the flicker-flash of surrealism
we chase each other around the throughways of time,
he thinks sardonically,
old thought-experiments
n sifi movies
blur in’s head
sometimes he likes to change phonetics
2 make the ages pass quicker
Summon the future into his daemon-circle
Sleek white metal crudely sketched with chalk
but then he remembers
why would he want to make time fly?
he’s almost not quite already
a corpse
his organs to be given to the needy;
whose bones were mangled in a screech of force and shear;
ashes
to be recycled
into some plastic plowshare
and he goes home as water droplets
sizzle away from cool trashcan metal in the sunrise
v.
she used to notice the
people as they passed
one woman
large sunglasses and merely scraps of bird
down for hair
clinging to the inhospitable crags of experience in the woman’s head
fallen down on a bench next to the trash
can every visit
(but my visits are untimed, so purely coincidence)
One day the woman was gone of course
I’d gone before her birth that time
But she stopped looking
She wasn’t quite sure what they were testing for
In this vaporous evanescence
With its piercers-of-clouds and its towers-of-fiber singing in the alleys
And its gleaming, gold-studded people waiting in the dark
So she thought she’d not draw unnecessary conclusions;
Leave it alone
Not romanticize an experimental setting where
they were probably just testing weather conditions anyway
and no one cared about the constants; air, h2o,
some collections of adenine and proteins and
fallopian tubes and aortae and nitrogen and lysosomes
and sweeping tides of hydrochloric acid
burning durable soft membranes
probably just weather
and this rain of oil
vi.
“Oh,” he said,
Standing at a certain garbage can
In a certain city
he got there early;
she got there late
it is twilight for
the Chinese-food-restaurants
whose fluttering lights
beat at the burning purple
pavement reflecting above
and they stand there
in gray fedora
and navy leggings
and beaten dress shoes
and business jacket
sweat and life steaming out their pores
and pass the time
until there is none left for him
“Listen,” he says
“So?”
“You’re not…”
“Yeah?”
“Human?”
She sighs, vanishes
(into the elevator inside the high-rise next to them)
(as he walks away,
Chalks it up to another wasted day)
vii.
she decides to change the time a bit
to avoid this
nonsense and his floppy mouth that
tears at the corners of hers
but he follows
“I have math,”
He shoves a sheaf of papers at her,
“I know what you’ve done,”
Eyes bright with the offspring of his mind,
A blossoming litter of ideas,
Choked under the suffocation of no-time, and,
At the same time, pressed to perfection
The best thing to do is walk away
“I need a way out.”
Silence drapes
“I’ve got six months to live.”
its elegant
“I know you’ve got the medicine.”
arm over
“You’re from the future.”
her bow-shaped mouth
“Sorry, sorry I can’t help you
Try again later”
The lady vanishes
(for real this time)
The gnarled corpse-like hand of hope
Leaves bruises on her muscled arm
And contorted face
viii.
Perversely,
She visits
Six months later
Hops around days, weeks, months
Pacing endlessly,
Filling a radius of half a year
With pointillist dots of light
An Ishihara test for the life-blind
Nowhere is he.
Death peeks out of the emptiness,
Perversely.
ix.
she goes back
for death is a cheap plastic jacket
with shells of blue and reversible green
and it does not keep out the rain
or the wind
sweeping dust over vast plains
gives him a pill
and jumps away
shhh don’t tell
a child’s brown eyes
scorning death
wink at him
ever after
from the crevasses of dirt and litter
growing
between the sidewalks