Google Me (11/06 draft)

At first the map's a blur until it takes you where you want to go.
But by the time the pixels crystallize into a view, it's dated.

Are the ghosts plasma, millions of pixels scattered in debris trails?
Am I so scattered that the voices that make me are not coming through.
They take away the real stuff and you're stuck with that reconstituted lemonade.

It would however be far better to perish fast than to be paralyzed for life.
For the eye to shut than for the lids to be sliced open so you could see just a little.
A blaze of glory gone before a smouldering ember in the grate.

#############################

How the ghosts like to speak through rotating machinery,
through the white noise made by smoke alarms when they go off,
how they speak through short-wave broadcasts when a preacher
in Texas isn't howling his readings of prophecy at the moon,
and how, between the rogue states and the catatonics rigged with baby-monitors
a dead aunt instructs some complete strangers how to fold correctly her linen,
how the surface hisses of a stereo are either aural Rorshach patterns
or the medium by which the dead return to instruct us, their bodies
ectoplasmic, pixellated, but streaked as comet-trails--Hale-Bopp
the last bus for them departing to the Empyrean.

************************

11/18/06

post-boomer couples would rebound from their Elements if
in Vermont or if New Hampshire their Hummers to buy
boom-boxes, home entertainment tuners
and giant high-definition liquid crystal wall-screens
on which to view computer-animated bestiaries in blu-ray.

And after the party Dad in his untucked sportshirt
had paid the bill, the kids rebounded in the backseat,
all that equipment crowded into the van in transit.
They had to wear white shirts and ties as part
of their role as sales personnel. Those were his friends.

Elastic-limbed, luminiscent cartoon zebras
in the HDTV demo. To the naked eye as detailed,
as articulated as mosaic tile, as mosaic walls.

suburban post-boomers whose children bounded from the SUV
to browse giant screens and double woofers to fill
their McMansions with light and sound.

The Puppeteers Are the Archons (worthless crap rating)

Asked Bobby of Jack Must Marilyn go?
And Jack nodded, the tapes turned off.
And the Dictabelts were destroyed
recording when they passed judgement
but the secretary took the rest home
and the she disappeared as well.

Soon corpses appeared on riverbanks
and medical records vanished
or were by loyal nurses misplaced.
And the databanks featured gaps
conspicuous as the holes in cheese.
And the frames in the hobbyist's camera
archon-agents also tampered with.

Then again, in one's soft ripe age,
one can be duped by the Sunday funnies.
Even common weather is a smoke-screen.
About to talk, the starlet
was bathed by the coroners.
The make-up streaked across her face
made her look like a clown.

01/31/09

Giant blimps, puttering over the skyline,
some with colored brands, what became of them?
What about the sky-writers along the beach?
Moving along slowly as lumbering fish?
Groupers, puffy, their cheeks swollen?
Do they attract the female with their cheeks?
Or does their dorsals' resplendence do this?

Where did the girls selling Evening Standards go,
in their ready-for-tennis skirts in the park?
How about those luncheonettes in the square?
Who can wear a sign across his shoulders
for a cobbler or a sandwich shop?

another 01/31/09

The snow amounts in piles big enough for igloos,
liebensraum enough. I wish the snow were money,
there is so much of it. Famously Eskimos have many coinages
for snow. The kingdom of Venice thrived on barges of ice
gliding to them from the Alps. Ice was cash then.
Whereas banks melt into air. Gold is even riskier.
Alchemists are summoned or executed. That igloo in my yard,
now that's money in the bank. I might live within it,
or my dog could. Sadly I cannot sustain a life in snow
and money soon is worth the paper that it's printed on.
Snow is more valuable on paper, the value melting,
ice more useful than paper. All the indicators stick.
With time a sunbeam can be tapped from a cucumber.

01/31/09

You turned into a mouse-tit or a chickadee
A cat was out to get you with his giant paw,

when from the blue fell the tail-pin hawk to rescue his cousin
from that most predatory of four-footed species,
that stalking, hairy, gross-pawed house cat.

And one claw and one mottled wing
are the last thing chickadee or mouse-tit can see
in your day-dream.