INSTRUCTION PSALM

It’s all in the way you point your hunger.
What do you taste more now--blood, or the acrid blanch of certain oxides?
The rise of satellites is intrinsically tied to the deepening roots of gene-spliced tubers.
The underage cocktail waitress showing some cleavage understands herself as well
as an abandoned mine-field does.
The terror of the obsolete grows in every organism.
Remember your first test paper?
Filling in the blanks?
One hesitant scratch of graphite
across a long white field.
Your guess is as good as mine.

VACUUM PACT

When you live in a vacuum, you have a lot
of extra room. It’s like you’re single-handedly
bringing back the lost sonar language of dolphins and whales, gone the way of the power boat.
It’s like the whole dominion over heaven and earth
thing, but reduced to a convenient palm-pilot form.
It’s like call and answer, but you’re always on hold.
It’s like you already said what I was just saying,
and any room for disagreement was decommissioned.
It’s like they say, you can never go home again,
but here I am.

MESSIANIC OVER-RIDE

So, do you think it was worth it?
Speaking as one suckled mouth to another?
You went the extra mile, man.
Not everyone gets to see the name
of the toxin they slip into the school lunch
to keep us this complacent.
Not everyone gets to read the ad
from the inside. Maybe you should
be wearing robes, and I should
be setting your beard on fire—
I don’t know. I haven’t been cleared
for those kinds of protocols.
But I can’t shake the feeling
that you’re a circuit that should be closed.

FALL OUT

Am I that transparent? I thought
these asbestos overalls were a good enough
cover for a first date going south in a hurry.
Do we have a safety word? A shut-off valve?
I thought my death-by-horseback-riding-accident
could make some pretty good press.
Or are you going with a “nuclear incident?”
That’s just like you; head straight for
the scorched earth-and-vicious-spin-cycle, and let the fall out fall where it may
be able to poison a few other footprints
along the way. Your finger’s on the trigger.
I just smile, politely.

WARNING PSALM

You must not keep still, but vibrate, like any given crop or mineral. At least these things understand that
the center will hold, that the molten core is a far-off
goal to grow toward, but whose outskirts offer extinction. My God, that any of us makes claims on the absolute.
That only comes after the disaster. While we're in it,
we're as naked as Kansas. Do you begin to see that in our role as survivors of nothing, we give up
everything? The flash of eyes, the groping reach---truly, an international moment. Do you begin to see?
That in the muting of our differences, we might
lend ourselves to silence?

SACRIFICE

All the dead men in their fancy waistcoats flip you the finger, say, “Give up all hope.”
The cannibals are dining strictly on their own
and the lion lays down in King Tut’s country home.
The sun is always shining but you’re cold
to the bone, and you’re buying steak knives over the telephone
and you’re eyeing the lamb
and the cub and the kid
and you know you love them
but something’s gotta give.

CONSTRUCT

This is a house of worship. You can tear it down
any way you decide. You can say I was praying,
or burning inside. You can hand me the torch,
let me do it myself. You can tell me again
how innocent I am, once it’s done.
How I was chosen, how I was always meant
to be the one.