Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

I was going through my old negatives from the Mississippi State Days of Glory, and found this photograph, which, I believe, shows the now famous artist Mitchell Wright in his early days of thought.

I have others. But this one seemed the most appropriate, all things considered. I’m a sappy guy, and I miss those good old days hanging out on the stair steps at some Mississippi State building.

Later, I hope to find the Polaroid which, I think, shows Mitchell in the good old days hanging out in front of a Mexican Restaurant.

But, one photo at a time, as my mom used to say.

I don’t normally draw out my poem structures beforehand, but I thought I’d give it a try, and this is the result.

I thought it might be interesting to anyone who wonders how such things burble in my poetry mind.

Each reader graduates this Spring, so I hope you got to hear them while they were here, or that you find them wherever they shall roam.

It’ll be well worth your time to seek them out.

Language and Cultures in “Cybrid” Practices

Everybody Believes in Me

Stop. Please, but if you must, then here, my left thumb. Flips between
Two yellow plastic buttons, left and right. My right thumb, too?

For you, anything. That thumb aims for our lives. That is, if you
Are my enemy, or if you are me, in the spaceship. You inhabit

The hand-held video game’s black plastic and red screen. Simple.
The graphics plain, all built from the same spaceship shape. Repeated.

These thumbs. The nine year old boy attached to them.
Beyond him, outside, Winter leans into Spring. Rain.

The leaves, the arms of angels, bud on the trees, green as starlight,
Others, coals of hell. Of Hell, where they’ve been waiting.

Spaceships falling in ordered rows. Heaven drops choruses.
The aliens don’t resemble. They are. Exacting. Us. At the bottom

Of the screen, we dodge the falling shapes, us’s, become bombs.
Understood to be. Suspended belief. Nine me flicks the Fire

That sends the shape of me towards me and when we meet, we vanish.
Explode. One. Of us. A victory. One. A loss. If you’re content with this,

1979 was a clear year. Take it. The shields shaped of us. Protection
Was us. You and me, and now, you, now.

If you’d like the aliens angels and the angels, devils, and the shots, angels
Or devils. We all kill each other. All the ends look the same. The boy

Fires. Shoots. Fired. Shot. If you must believe, you can drop in rows,
An alien. Or if you must believe, you can be me,  or with me, breathing.

Intent. In the ship below. Roll right. That boy’s blue eyes and blond
Hair and concentration. The game has no end. While I, rest, between.

Take this. You will have it forever. This world doesn’t stop.
Without stopping, The you me us aliens drop without mercy.

1979’s game can’t afford an ending. Too cheap for an afterlife.
Trade you. I breathe out. You breathe in.

what do you think a vampire potato would eat?

Meet Your Maker

At our great grandmother, Cora’s, funeral,
We’re hungry, and you whisper we should
Lead the funeral procession into the drive
Through at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Then we have to leave, straining against
Our giggles, to stand in the vestibule,
Abandoning Cora, who lies with her arms
Crossed, her hands painted to hide her

Life, covering her liver spots. When I
Say, hands, you pull out a twenty dollar
Bill and give it to me, as was her habit
With each of us. Grinning or winking

She would slip the money into our hands
Or pockets, make us promise to keep it.
Our secret. The bills tingled from her constant
Snuff. You say, I always snuck

The money back into her purse, and when
You look at me, you know I kept the money.
What? No matter how little or how much. Give me
Back my twenty. No.

From Cora’s room, filled with her children,
Their children, and all the rest, floats the preacher’s
Voice, Cora’s favorite, a man proud of fire
And brimstone, She’s gone to meet her maker.

Like this? I said, crossing my arms over my tie,
That doesn’t sound like fun. How will they
Hug? And we’re off with other possible poses,
Arms wide open, to hug our Maker,

Or Legs, you said. Or priapic, ready to Meet
Your Maker. You look out the window
At the parking lot, its cars at once blurred
And glinted by the June Mississippi light,

And ask if I remember stacking bodies
In my grandmother’s back yard. I do.
Our Army Men’s casualties, those bodies, pebbles.
The men themselves, green plastic, their roles
As defined as the coffin pose. The Machine Gunner.
The Radio Man. The Infantry Soldier.
We burned them, you say, smiling.
Melted. Where did we get the matches?

Some, we twisted into new shapes, and buried
With the pebble bodies. The mushed men, next to
Smooth stones, our idea from the Sunday School
Shroud. Of how death should be.

The acrid burning of those soldiers, clear
As any smell. As Cora’s perfume, revealed
In the last years of her life as she forgot her
Addictions and her loves. Scent under Snuff.

Meet Your Maker Your Way, you say,
Custom Coffins our new business.
Ready For Love, The most popular model.
Legs open. You laugh, We’re going to Hell.

And now. Now you have taken yourself
For that meeting. You in your coffin’s coffin,
Classic. And I have to leave again,
Stand outside, this time, June still, still.

When I turn to where you should be, were,
I can still hear your voice and see you
Walking with arms folded, then unfolding
Bat, I said. No, you said, a baby bird,

Opening your arms. Cheeping.

Began arriving as attachments. I didn’t recognize them at first, for what they were, are. Were, now. Before these, what I had: a brittle memory of myself receiving a present and when I tell my mother that I remember my father, who left her, us, when I was four, she says, Your father never gave you shit. We were driving, her to the left of me, the car overflowing with the family that wasn’t and I didn’t question her instead wondered which boyfriend, then, I was remembering. And then thirty years of nothing until email and attachments, the subject lines letters that at times almost became words, squamous, quincer, skeinning, and inside no words only the attachment. The first I threw away as a matter of course, not wanting to catch whatever lurked in the waiting .jpg files, but then curiosity, boredom, combining, and what the fuck, it’s only a virus, what can it do, hit, and I began opening them. Images. The first a deep array of interlocking limbs, as of trees, or rivers, and blood, circulatory systems, maroon black and garnet red and behind the nest of rivers the outline, the shape, a person? A blob. The abominable man. Then he is young, younger than I am now, in black and white, his head tilted to one side his eyes in shadow leaning easy against a doorframe and in his left hand, held with no consequence, a heart, his right hand a fist, his white T-shirt unstained and his jeans clean but at the bottom of the frame a pool of blackness beneath the heart and hand and I cannot ask mother to confirm his identity while I don’t need her as looking into the image on the screen becomes a small mirror. There’s no mistaking our resemblance. And still they came. One, close on his head, his eyes a clear blue as if punched through to the sky and around his ears and hair, green clover, pounds of it, each with four leaves, and though there’s no reason to think so, the picture ends an inch below his Adam’s apple, I know there is no body down there, outside of the frame, the browser, the computer, and his eyes are lit but not by life. A variety? A smorgasbord? A cornucopia? Of death. Deaths. Each time, he was back. A cartoon father who showed himself in the throes of possibility, though there was a progression of distance, near and far, nearer and farther, the swing-set he didn’t build he swung on, hanging from the seat, so limp the implication was obvious, but who needed implications when the certainty was so certain I ignored them for weeks, months, training the computer to shuffle the missives to the trash until I missed one and this one, I had been lapsing, was no death of father a grin, his teeth even and his face crinkling around his eyes in his hands the camera pointed at me and the next email the image was darkness and the next image was darkness and the next, the rectangle filled the screen deep with empty, the sort of empty you fall into, when you are forgotten. When you forget.