HELMETS, for Sarah

helmets to protect my investments
extra padding, your traffic cone, a tank kit
love & the inevitable
martian memos for mom
entertainers at the metropolis & all
the thematic cheese-
shaped huzzahs that trample bundles of cash

another poem (let me know what you think)

While the west whisks by, blurred and blushing,
we wait for what we can’t manufacture, the
moon, the tides,
norepinephrine, the watch.

Nobody worries over pie-tins and
porch-lights, broken keels, struggles with helmets;

we press greasy faces to flowing glass,
gasping like rheumatic fevers “why
no sparrow,     mother?
why still mistake?”

ae poem

leap vessel!
enthrall my effervescent challenge
the majesty!
& search drapes & deserts
abstract letters that swell by hand
& center the ashen artery
death!
a well-dressed parable
each day
drags & keels
as the sea flashes
masked desks & parallel spreadsheets
databases that eat spleen!
& skewer tea
then
present separate beers each week
at relevant staff meetings

love

love is a complicated multi-turret system
w/ many primary sensor suites &
target acquisition systems or
target designation systems
really w/ four subsystems &
laser rangefinders / spot trackers / target designators
it resembles a barrel set on its side
colloquially referred to as the "Super Bug"
& sometimes the "Rhino"
(for its prodigious nose)
but love vacations in
Cordova, Spain—the Andalusian Caliphate
love tells schoolchildren about the Wright Brothers & Ibn Firnas
“we thought he was certainly mad & feared for his life”
considerably, as if a bird
& love lounges at the mall w/ many stylish teenagers
& space traveling advertisers while
love codes software simulators
& assigns missions to Canada
for microbrews, erotic dancing, & biplanes
love throttles through turbulence
to de-cloud the systematic undressing of open
air malls in Kansas
love loves love
but lamination can only save the faithful
while love labors internationally
& abandoned now w/ computer princesses,
jet planes, & tax burdens,
what mule will displace love’s tawny gap?
while hiding in the Ozarks
will love know the cloak & dagger maneuvers?
the clandestine accounts of silly torpedoes?
& isolated in the stratosphere w/ threescore enemies
or doppler radar tracking each feint & shimmy
will love puddle again?
as we investigate these precise robots

read this poem:

My Software Mission, by Maged Zaher

skiff poem

you have a skiff. you, skiff. that’s a verdict of history. you have a skiff. it’s not your skiff, you have. just two short centuries. not my skiff, anymore. any. living standards to undreamed heights. let’s talk about pre-capitalist skiffs. let’s talk about. a skiff about to talk about political yolk. skiff of feudal eggs. skiff no longer wracked by famine & recurrent plague. skiff of unspeakable poverty. not another skiff. not another. you have my skiff. dear. not another. you have my skiff dear. can do no more. not my skiff. can do no. you have it, dear. not my skiff. let’s talk about market price, dear. you, skiff of mine. tell me, skiff. you, skiff of mine.

read this:

Joyelle McSweeney review of Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat.

poem e

a trip to stolid pond. astronomy. no one’s afraid of bird flu. i laugh a last flurry. his hut still waits on tourists who think “this” is invasion. i scan & nothing can harm a man who shrugs as winds adapt. i shoot a million photos of night sky as ticking broadcasts alarm. i join a rush of owls & a million washouts amass. that's a lot of ammunition, I say as i stoop into my plot. i study this small shack, doubt our bombing provisions. an odd arrow spouts crimson & calls a tornado to dismay this data of brutal augur. looming storm, you scowl at my invalid faith. i point to a shotgun & a proviso of stylish indians across the river. i build it all, halt as i solicit an icon for our only portico. i panic our marquis who will unbind us of this task & pit us against imps in a cock fight. a swift spoil chops, possibly, or a firing row prolonging. i log how my pallid skin harks again. you study in calm activity, of tourists crying about lost wood, bowls that swap a glossy pond & job formation. an arbitrary dig will bully doctors & boots. our skirmish haunts bits of old spartan custom. i ask who’ll join my backyard tonight, as I dig tombs for ribs that fail to contract as airbags contract on highways. who can bury our trio and sing hymns to vacant lodgings in solitary oklahoma? i can curry and distract. i can pass on & sow profits. i can.

read this:

Jessica Clark bloggin at In These Times

robot poem

Attention:

You diet robots, you robots in food systems, you robots who detect anti-personnel land mines in Tokyo, you robots of hazard & judgment.

Attention:

Robots that ‘live’ on the bottom of the ocean, robots that hit birds hit by climate, motion / position / status robots, diet / nutrition / consumption robots.”

Attention:

Senate robot wars & those gearing up for robot wars.

O port of the war on terrorism, department’s broad agency, purchaser of designer brief-cases & LEGO robot kits.

Can scientists help win the war against bio-invasion?

Attention:

Diet war robots who make automatons who make gripper robots & hands for robots.

Where are the personal robots? the zero gravity boots?

O robots, you diets & wars, you robot colonies on the moon who manipulate and control robots in this time of war, you ragtag group of misfit robots, you simple story of a boy & his robot dog battling evil.

Attention:

You robot theological society who wrote about robots & commander robot’s capture.

You mission robot leaders discovering deadly enemies—enemies who seek to change robot goal structures.

& you mobile autonomous robot software, engineer of human / robot interactions, creator of synergistic cyber-forces.

Attention:

Robot destruction is at hand.

With weapons of precise destruction.

With pioneer pilot robots.

You, developer of robot vehicles, & LEGOnauts, will cease.

Intentional self-destruction is illegal in the robot destruction derby.

Robot, robot.

You treasonous bunny.

“They separated it using a knife or a sword and each took one piece and cherished it.”

product development says, “great success.” red & yellow signs. bunny rabbits. child-hordes. a feel-good story w/ marketers hand-in-hand, their cherub cheeks puffed azure, a sky like sky like commercial, & so many children w/ wristwatch calculators figuring sales tax & chore burdens—such talents taught lovingly in elementary school. O love, i need you & your spiral catalog. i need your dewdrop eyes pulling tears from my pores. i need your orange fleece vest & its dewy warmth to hold me through this wintry quarter.

everyone should read

this: lime tree & this: vert

“the empty parking spot will bring sadness to everyone”

& suburban teenagers will take all the fashionable poetry to the supermarket in black jeeps & w/ their parents’ watches, they will revolutionize disaffection. i am only commercialized as i appropriate ethical t-shirts & support our burgeoning economy. so many newspapers & the closest thing to war is independent music. i’m independent. i’m no corporate pawn. i balloon at your insinuation. protest is better than the prom & i have fifteen kittens, one for each country i will visit after graduation. i will wrap them as gifts but not cruelly & w/ such fine hair it is no wonder i can’t strangle even myself w/out some caustic remark. O marginal people. don’t forget to be grateful for everything you know.