Kezar

Secret syntax of the scraggy lake-born children,
          algae-faced and shrieking, whom we hear descending
                    loose and leafy patchwork hillside paths at dawn. They
                              slip beneath the dewy dock. We hope to learn their
                                        water language (or at least to shape its grammar
                                                  to a grid as vengeance for the rusted hinges,
                                        molds, and screen porch wire snipped by long nails in the dark).
                              At the house on Kezar Lake, us symptomatic
                    queer stigmatics sleep beneath the deck. (The floors and
          pipes have rotted through. Pink mushrooms ate the beds.) We
                    huff quartz dust from plastic pails, smoke dandelion
                              greens, score liturgies for birds we free from seaweed
                                        tombs: Ondine! / The world is ended / Burn the water /
                                                  Breathe our stone-dust, sad survivors / Breathe it / Breathe it /

Won’t Have Had To Have Been At All

- as a young teen, I watched others,
older teens, buy butterfly knives
from a Bar Harbor tourist shop.
I stole a pouch of salvia,
smoked it supine on a jetty.
          I became a cartoon goon. Took
          long steps on the curve of the world,
          crept across my skull and back,
          legs 240p and glitchy,
          spectra where there shouldn't be.
Woke up chin-deep in the ocean.

I seek the means to defragment
my mind; all night, I dunk myself
head-first in burning blue light baths.
It's not as nice as nothing, still.
So if I die (vs. digitize),
          I hope to be the lonely mass
          within an ovate supervoid.
          Won't have had to have been at all.
          More likely, I will come-to cursed
          in conglomerate consciousness.
We'll navigate the void. How grand,

to spend my after-time with every
other living dead. I'll roll my
post-corporeal analog
for eyes, whatever they may be.
I hope there's an orthant for queers.
          And if we're fifth-dimensional,
          our metamind will wonder why
          one former, time-flat habitus,
          lain at birth on firework ash, stayed
          awake in beds for solid years.
Ennui has no direction. He

nests beneath the lexicons of
kids who spent time high in dark rooms,
ears pressed against a subwoofer:
an attempt to counterbalance
infrasound (the lonelinesses
          that shake old houses and the meats
          of young folk. It's how the exurbs
          got their present notion of ghosts)
          resonating within sternums.
          Our scientists can map the waves
crosswise the shape of lifetime bodies -