on my laptop I watch two poets survey the glacier’s corpse
Her ice was so old, says the poet in the practical shoes, it was only a matter of time
Time is only a matter of distraction, says the poet whose face has been
water-tabled, I input data on my laptop, counterfeit Wikisphere, before I became a writer I
burned CDs by the hundreds & now that information leaks toxic landfill chemical child
tumors because I wanted
more, the poets check their phones
they scratch letters onto the screens with stones, they slide off their gun belts, my laptop
repeats itself, total bloodline inundations through Japan, Amazonas Brazil, along the American
Gulf Coast via special effects that cost more than I earn in a given decade the poets’ guns
sprout wings & fly out over the glacier where they land & begin to mate, emptying their
clips into each other ahhh an apocalypse of replication
in the hooded dream of no service
the poets witness nothing
to nap beneath the inelegant sun is the poet’s profession, forward thinking
malignant, this inability to look at the camera, I’m chatting in loops with everyone who is a
vampire, imitative grumps, on my laptop I clone a contamination that infects my eyes,
my outfit, my laptop
a glint of dead ice, a glint of gun metal, glint of the bards encased naked beneath glacier rot
sharing earbuds, idling, output bad
instincts I am a threat to myself these many duplicates
Dave Brennan the author of the forthcoming book Disintegration F_ace (Schism Press) and the poetry chapbook A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit, winner of the BOOM Chapbook Contest and forthcoming from Bateau Press. His recent poems have appeared in BathHouse Journal, FENCE online, Conduit, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University. WEB
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