Strobos (Deadpan)
for Dorothea Lasky
There are things we live among
and there are things that make us
undead in seeing them or by
their very use of us I saw Dottie
the dead ones we would feign
on our adult screens scare me
"me and my shadow" where I go
nothing follows no one because
this not-following was us at play
in eternity there was no trace
had not been taken by our steps
our ands and buts and conjunctives
these real sweet-nothings pimp us
out like substance interrupted
a baby which grows from it
and doesn't have a name we
would like to say yet if a name is
like a strobe staggered in shiny
moments we felt its actual poses
as our impermanent movement
what we don't see as a duration
but only the semblance of when
you put roots here and name them
“desire” desire which made things
grow only sometimes which left
bite-marks like question marks
while we were still in medias res
birds swept down to catch us
and care for us before we really
fell back-to-life such recurrences
were real you say death is never
really fair like your life like our lives
when you touch me there and stare
out from it like it was always here
always before a guilt of caring I don't
want your roots & branches to ever
die this forest of meaning even if we
know their names even when love
knows the names it desires to be
called by to make a new subject from
this subtraction this being entity
where the sun’s often trapped like
bronze and outlives our lives the simple
animals torn limb-from-limb the things
we should be startling poetry for the
first time and make everything fear
we were finally We deadpan seeing
everything the sun involved as though
for the last time this sickness a cure
that can in fact have no name but
gravity given to teeth and pain all
the machine movements we ever make
like stop-action babies we can't ever have
the noonlight of that video which is you
in a way ready to announce yourself
an idea of your “bigger” self little ones
that go like big ones do the lumps meta-
physical lumps of the mind and actual
lumps materials as they are made by
no one can never be a shared child
can this be embodiment like bumper
cars only shocking when they stop
our techne a world of surprise and
blinking the eyes were so exhibited
for control and controlled us verily
they were convertible they made our
lives more real writing through riding
to make this last man suffer the dis-
tances the little huts of us a *domos*
the wind swept them and blew our
windows open disturbed the curtains
changed the mood of last things that
would come to touch us like a wind
or tears thru which we see the world
somehow corrected sex was true
the wind when we are coming (and
we are coming) complicit in evidence
no longer some excrescence or
stupidity of the sky like Williams says
herds and heads of men like armies
battalions of stumps men should also
sing joyous stealth what’s burnt at
least is seen and what isn’t seeing
a faction not entirely opposed to
force tingling where we might dis-
appear still within a trembling earth
under a torn canopy through the open
night before anything we learned was
useful or what we could see the blank
neutrality of those lips before me the
genital contact of the animal too close
to this color to feel it to feel anything
but a general dreaming that thoughts
were feelings too and sense an image
catching up to us totally desynched
from worlds in their prehensions of
what poses us what moves discretely
not as me in this detachment semblances
of “haunted” nature the quote around our
necks stubborn as our literal dreaming
preponderances of flesh mold this
crawlspace this airlock the sudden
dying-with-you how the shadows grow
and close in and are in us and become
us so we were their insatiable interior.
