Originally published in The Garden in the Machine (Hidden Brook Press 2007)

Humanity

We are not correctly conditioned,
not appropriately endowed
with the complication of flesh-stabilized claws.
Fingers are not for tearing meat;
fingers are for the concrete comfort of touch.

Our scent is perfumed under glass,
delicate and shatterproof:
the transparent accumulation
of a creation designed to decontrol.

Once Summer’s expectant bulge
was as welcome as the death of winters
spent wondering if the Sun would dim
and leave this world congealed like the Arctic,
a polarized and hardened old wound.

Breezes tamper with our windows,
screens banging eulogies
for the death of pathetic fallacy.

Science

No forces seem to convey dreamergency:
no falsettos alarmed;
no sleep-apnea finds.

Conspicuous in our present resentment,
as cryptic, as alone as the city
that lies about us in the sand,
we breed with Pandemonium
and her sister Inspyration.

We are the sinfallible prescience:

lovers of flesh, believe
no other Rexecutive:
we eat the same as you,
respond to the same vagrant urges,
the whirlwindolent dimaginitive impulse
to negate all values over wasted time.

Response stability intaches,  not only
passed the cardiac sphincter, but along
the motor nerves behind the tears and tongue.

Assume our premise is incorrect,
as unnecessary as napkins to immaculate eaters,
as fussy as raccoons,

but then again the bandit-eyed
bandage whom they please
while the sophomores grapple with I’dea
like broken-nosed, finger-jabbing wrestlers.

God

Once upon a distance
we working-classembled
this babble of towers,
climbed sprintermitently,
giraffafraid of failure
to establish a permanent foundation
for the machine that could tame the tornado:

We watch the foetus of heaven
destroy its mother
with that terrible umbilical.

The architects of spirit fail.