Current

Cracked apple skins cast metallic glows
on empty library tables
and somewhere a disk spins for you.

Growth rings of spare thoughts are carefully etched
in square sterile packs
like initials scratched in wet driveway.

Keep your hands in the dirt
feeling for tendrils of 4th degree friends-in-law
paired through shared ska bands and live diatribes

grow friend trees until they’re leafless
leave tags online like hazard signs
bridge the missing links

chance sightings ride in the currents,
lie bloated out on the beach,
waiting to be hauled through the town square.

Milk white sheets sit
inches away from our fingers
as bits flip for new key hits

and instantly seeds of silicon,
digit filled and freshly referenced,
bubble up.
_________

A common subject for me. Something about the potenial of social networks just gets my mojo work, ya feel me? So much potential this sudden ablity humanity has to be linked, beyond language or space or time, all one degree of separation from each other. Exciting time we are living in. Exciting time.

Redundancies

1
Every day is Monday. Mass additions fix split infinitives on 30 minute thesises spit out with a 90% accuracy. He sells them for pesos on an online word sharing colbrabotative editing co-op and invisible millions change all last names to “shithead.” Forum boards flame that, no, in fact Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers did not feature King Louie, the black male archetype from the prophetic Jungle Book, and thus the lessening of scale of the show does not reflect a change in racial dynamics within the Disney Corporation. See thesis #19247 “The Evolution of Gender Roles within Tailspin”, #23943 “Little Buddy: Latent Homoerotic Messages Within Disney Cartoons of the Mid-Nineties” and #95237 “The Politics of Pooh Bear: How the Hand Gestures of Christopher Robin Marked the Downfall of the Modern Conservative Movement.”

2
Cup of coffee #13. 4 clicks of a stylus on a cell phone screen 3 fingers wide and a female voice answers with a slightly southern huskiness “4:42.” 15 about to cube time. There, he moves virtual surfaces into the rough approximation of a human, point by point. Charged transistors represent elbows bound to hollow flesh gripping the bow of navy ship breaking in two from a storm. The simulations runs all night, testing different odd contortions of broken limbs as solders jump from all sides. It is concluded that in the event of such an emergency, everyone would die.

3
My laptop crashed.

Andre slouches in his chair. The Patriot plays in the background. Scattered tapping as class 102 picks out notes and surfs porn and ims their cousins. Tech support has been on its way since third period. The teacher stands, imagines taking an unread book in his hand and slamming it on the desk. Last night’s high lingers behind his eyelids. Turning off the plasma, he looks at his list of required questions and asks #25.

What is the name of British loyalists during the Revolutionary War?

His laptop light up with answers from 2/3 of the students. A quarter of those answers are correct. He stares for a moment, shrungs and pulls up a calculator over a sky blue official-looking background. “Microsoft School of the Future” it says, in bold Times New Roman.

4
Saturday morning preaching and Sunday morning meeting and Monday evening study and Tuesday evening revival and Wednesday night congregation and Thursday night bible reading and Friday night fellowship. And work Monday, work Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, 8 hour full day concrete and wood and big trucks, wide loads, moving fast and to the next and all the while waiting, talking to others waiting, holding keepsakes of the dead for the next life, waiting to see them, praying you’ll get there, and in the meantime hurry, hurry, next and next and next and next.

5
Your knees are inches from your forehead. Periodic rocking.

I can’t see the face of God. I can’t see the face of God.

Nature told you to let go. He had thick brown dregs and did hand stands. You played chess together. They flashed a picture of a purple and blue fractal in your face. You ran outside. They laughed.

That’s why you only play this game when you are really zooted.
stoned.
baked.
blazed.

Noise hurts. There is so much. God, it is SO thick.
What is there left to dream about? Am I dreaming? Is this all a dream?
You vomit.

The next day.
You are handing a half-caf mocha no whip to a girl on a cell phone. Daemon taps you on the shoulder and laughs.

Hey, good shit no?

You nod.

__________

This is a piece made shortly after returning to Philadelphia a little more then a year back. It spoke to a feeling of useless with all the screens and gadgets and 9 to 5 do nothing jobs. A new version was made for publishing in Pax Americana, fantastic web journal back in San Francisco run by some friends of mine. It was also one of a few pieces I attempted to make into a piece of art. Kind of text heavy, but a nice attempt I think. You can check that out by hitting the thumbnail.

Hello World.

The clash of asynchronous paths.

The catch and throw of simultaneous objects in the context of a pre-ordered ebb and flow.

And given time, the syntax matches the pattern matching of each synapse,
All feedback is feed through structures inherited from some parented one.
Some superclass through which the base is made more specialized.
Each function less virtual.
For each, a filtering pass through which an object’s true mission becomes a solid block of cognition.

In the clash of asynchronous paths
exceptions are the rule.

The hard and fast are parsed into weighted conditionals but somehow some events always seem to flag true and the past recurs and merges sometimes and with hope is split and solved and still some core is unresolved though, isn’t it?

Some leaf.

Some chance branch of truth, perhaps that base class through which all have evolved and yet just out of grasp, or perhaps nothing.

Perhaps null.

Maybe just the random flash of asynchronous collisions,

the crash of pseudo-randoms based on a unknown seed,

and an input
expanding breathe-first through a network
a million loops and levels deep: a google.

__________

The Googlism is a religon (used in the loose, satrical flying spegetti monster sense of the word) that believes that given its unseen, omnipresent, near-omniscient, allegedly benevolent status google must be accepted as a scientifically verifiable god. Seriously. This poem was the result of a trip to the site and a semester’s worth of constant programming.