I pulled a circle apart (2003, never finished, never cut)

I pulled apart a circle until it was a drum
and tapered cones more so they fit the payload
but pierce the cloud-banks and the bunker’ s hardened armor
or the helicopter cabs in which the shadow government
would flee. The fins were pure V-2, the engine pending.
I fused the separate parts, silvered the whole thing over.
Chaos, Inc. would be the NGO to sponsor the take-off.

To where would chaos fly? I would have to draw
multiple environments, steal objects from the neighborhood,
plot them in 3-D cubes. Tempting you to shoot a chicken
scurried through cobbled hamlets reminiscent of Mexico,
except their lack of Aztec ornament. And you had to choose
the virtual chicken’s feathers. Would they be tawny or calico,
the latter subspecies unknown? Once chosen,
you could blow the chicken to bits. How well the designers
had mastered chicken anatomy! The internal and dark
externalized, like shriveled gloves drying on a radiator!
yet their surfaces connected, like those in Mobius strips,
geometry’s Siamese twins, faces apart, vertebrae joined.
Who were the software designers, butchers or magicians?
Then popped out a palette window to navigate universes,
albeit determined as roads sharply forking at intersections.
You couldn’t choose the tynes on the forks you ate with–

The choices were infinite, from Doric scrolls, to the severity
of the Israelites, to inappropriate fleur-de-lys wallpaper
or dumb concrete pressed with the grain of two-by-fours
that your single, hand-held, semi-automatic pistol
obliterated to meal, make chunks of concrete fly
or atomize to tinier particles too small for pixels to capture.

And when Barbara, my first crush, would mildly praise
my watercolor sketches with all their stilted proportions--
anything around her house was game for my loaded brush
(nuts and bananas in a bowl, cars in the driveway,
always dependable trees (sketched easily from the mind)) --
I would cry my way home, thinking she didn’t mean a word,
then console myself: she must be jealous of my talent!

Here, however, talent didn’t matter, choices did.
No one was, as they said, talented anymore. There were
only preferences, that built up, to constitute a world.
Every one had a world, but first you had to select it
from the palette. But with no virtual girl to be won

with a double-click I fired my weapon to the sky
and the blue neither cracked, nor rippled with heat-waves.
I swivelled to a bunker propped on a calm sea
but without connections, my bullets met nothing but walls,
as if I had declaimed this poem to water or written
to Barbara, crumpling the completed letter in my hand.