You know this laptop, this Android is more capable than
Apollo 11. The moon’s lonely distance. We hold such tiny

comforts in our vastness of insignificance. Circuitboards run
their own marathon and electricity flows through them. Me,

I don’t believe I am a spaceship even though we live on one,
cruising through the uninhabitable zero against all odds,

each of us wired with biological programming. Darwin,
am I your darling? And I am, and you are – the product

of the grass that tastes like cirrhosis to me, the way it dries
rigid in the sun after heavy rain. What I need is something –

someone – to clear my mind, to absolve my white noise
of hayweeds, the rumba of cardiological time. My heart

does not follow logic, it follows pheromones, the way each
pleasurable thing leads to the next until all pleasure has been

scrubbed raw from the stars, that their gleaming was
always my imagination projected in the faintest way.

 

(originally published in Confluence, Spring 2020)