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[ X_] plays Planescape Torment

I am not a girl.
I am always waking up somewhere
completely gross. In this case an undead
factory complete with me, product #257
(or whatever the tag said, I lost it). The smell
of the talking skull isn’t so bad, just the rest
of me feels rubbery and old.
When they say the tang of copper blood
they mean this place, which is a mine of pain,
a staircase of creaking bones, an ever-present
stone furnace that could end my misery presumably.
But it just doesn’t get that easy.

The hero eternal has a bad haircut.
The hero eternal is sort of a lunkhead, but
he’s me, and I try to play him faithful to the part
complete with reading all my former skins
stretched like drumheads on the wall.
Or maybe I’m just the eternal bro
doomed to wander the world looking
for high fives and bandages, a new girlfriend
and more bandages and unable to defeat myself
properly, or look myself in the eye.

---

---

Messaging the dead

I watch as the cursor glides across the screen
captured in a chat box, hesitating as in life,
or maybe it’s just harder to get the Internet
where the dead are. They take turns typing
cryptic messages asking where I am, what
am I wearing, why did I talk more to her
instead of him. They use acronyms of texting
because each letter travels so far from
echoing minds to my nervous eyeballs.
They always pass the Turing test in triplicate.
When I ask how it is over there they evade
comparison: “unspeakable” “indescribable”
“neither hot nor cold, really.” The dead
always miss me, but I am just another cursor
in the end, I could be anyone over here,
alive and well, trying to capture their footprints
as they try to capture mine. We cannot touch.
We think we understand. We type and type
worried to find that each has been talking
like the skim of a Ouija board’s glide
only to our own twitches and fears
all this time.

---

---

Do I look like I code?

This is what [X_]’s code looks like:
a teletype explodes after eating a dictionary.

This is what coding looks like from behind:
knob over knob of spine hunched over

tympani beat, flat Chiclet clicks,
uneasy buttocks shifting on a hard seat.

This is what [X_] coding looks like:
a shiny silver glow, a dull matte black square,

knob over knob hunched over tufts of hair,
fingers of light across a naked throat.

This is what happens when you code for [X_]:

<                                                >
Whatever you held in that space I erase.

---

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228 #This collision, defined

229     def collide (self,other_object):
230
231     x = self.get_radius ( )
232     y = other_object.get_radius ( )
233     raddistance = x + y
234
235     if dist (self.pos,other_object.pos) < raddistance:
236          return True
237     else:
238          return False

---

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While the day is its own 
autocracy, I am a citizen
staring out at the world,
touch the cool glass of rain's
mirror. Color deepens
then fades, a slow flicker
as if I am blinking,
as if I must open the eyes
inside myself to keep
democracy alive.

::

            the day is 

                                world
             the cool glass of 
               Color
                       a            flicker
                     blinking
                                the eyes
                           to keep
                      alive

::

            the 

                                world
             
               
                      
                     
                                the eyes
                                  keep
                      alive

He got the science wrong, according to the scientists, but it seemed Teilhard was on to something with regard to the evolution of culture and social structure. Evolution seems to favor the cooperative group. Certainly ants have taken over my backyard.

---

---

You are moving toward faster things
as evening blows papers around your step,
the hum of sidewalks pale and pocked;
you remove your hat with flourish at the red light.
You have told your stories,
striding corridors of skyscrapers, which reach
farther from you and you walk faster
following the breeze. Horns blow, echo
clank of subway cover over
and over. You are turning, step assured, kicking
aside the breeze. Ah, you are
finished business, in no need of direction,
but still not
faster than the night.

::

     evening blows 

                   your hat with 
                                   stories

                                                        which
                                                              echo
                                             over
and over
                                      you are
                                   in      need of 

                      the night

::

 
                                             

                                      you are
                                   

                      the night

Teilhard was born in the Auvergne, a sparsely populated area of ancient volcanoes, wild valleys, werewolf tales, and old languages. One could believe almost anything there.

---

---

As stars are not
the mystic harbor of my wishes
nor mass but space and burning,
so are my questions.

I come to every strange city
as a refugee coming home,
the old streets as if new,
a familiar portico, flourished pedestal,

view from this dusty window.
I am this name unasked.

::

      stars are

                                              burning
                    questions

I come to every                city

                            as if 
a 

                         dusty window

::

      stars are

                                              burning
                    

                    every                city

Teilhard de Chardin wandered into the realm of physics, considered the molecule’s ascension toward the cell, the cell’s journey toward the creation of conscious beings, and he compared the evolutionary trip of the physical and that of the spirit.

---

---

Tongue wakes to speak
morning before my eyes
and stumbles over some name
sought and forgotten.
This seems to be true:
Tasting is the essence
of being awake,
and as it is a sense not retained
well in memory, days are
for sampling flights
of what the waking makes.

::

Tongue wakes 
morning 
and stumbles 


Tasting
    being 
and 

      sampling
                the waking

::

    be


      
                the waking

But can systems learn from their own mistakes? Evolution would lead us to believe, to some degree, yes. Teilhard felt hopeful: that sense of emergence and possibility.

---

---

A young man in black pedals a black bike holds
a black umbrella light rain plunks everything
greening around him and pink
magnolia lets loose a petal high
crow transects his route the pedaler
glimpsing it all upside down in puddle
even as he rolls away

::

   young
                              light 
greening 


                                                    in puddle
                    rolls away

::

                              light 
greening 


                                                    
                             away

Teilhard believed that a system cannot be understood outside of time: all things are in process; nothing is static. We each are systems in the process of becoming, even as we are part of a large system which is also unfolding.

---

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banality of a wall

Heavy cinder set at the perimeter, cemented, stacked along the length that separates the parcel from the parcel that separates my neighbor from myself, separates the pale blue of the sunrise from salmon-colored sunset, the domicile from difference. Who lives beside me I can’t guess. One day the “under contract” sign was gone, and cars appeared, though weeds and grasses are the same, the same ivy overhangs, the same unruly hedge and vines of the forsythia disrespectful of the boundary, the mutual roots loosing tendrils like the hair of mute rapunzels from the towers of their trunks, bending toward the narrative of rescue, bending toward the light that’s shared like burden of the leaves that fall in litters, the nuts that gift the squirrels, the gift of strangers, neighbors I’ve not met, the blocks like barricade, or like retaining—topped with little plinths, some chipped, some broken, fissured by the protest of the wind, darkened by the heavy rains, aproned with a subtle fungus.

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