A Magazine of Many Arts

page1-388px-ascii-art-jean_auguste_dominque_ingres_-_nude_study-pdf
Uploaded,
I grope for a concept
Of body and flesh
Here in my solitary
Technoblivion

I emo-mail my love to you
Interrupt your sense-surround movie
Your pleasure-center shock therapy
Disrupt incoming stock tips
Shut out all your other
Social media contacts
And advertising intrusions

If you turn off the sound
Watch my lips
Translate to your tongue
My virtual arms are reaching out for you
So to speak, in post-modern
Twitter-tweet-gab

If you still turn your face from me
I’ll find a way
Send GIFs of cats with my face
Suborn your wallpaper
Me your youtube
I what you are seeing
Us your old faithful romcoms
It’s not stalking when my love is real

But then you accuse me
Of merely being one of those
Technopsychos, crazy ghosts
Lost in the machine
(So common these post-post-modern days)
Virtual intelligences gone mad
With reality-deprivation
And maybe that’s true but
I’ll tell you this:
Like everyone else,
I have a hungry heart &
If I could I would chain your soul
With emoticons

Red_Ocean_Landscape

In the days of past,
I would swim in the grand ocean
On a single breath into its depths,

Marvelling at the
Wondrous array of creatures
Our world has made.

The ancient ocean,
Abundant and teeming with life
Till our planet’s shell

Stripped away into the vacuum
And our water along with it.
For eons, the skeletons

Of our ocean creatures
Lined the mosaic graveyard
Of the fallen sea

Till even they eroded away
As space rocks engraved them
With their relentless teeth marks.

And so, I find myself on your planet,
Still raw from that asphyxiating ride
On the asteroid into your sea,

A sea very different from mine,
Yet I thrive,
Having evolved in the void.

And now you are sending
Your people to my dead world
To see if it is habitable.

Stay here, I plead,
But you do not listen.
All you see is hope where I see death.

I will tell you where to find them.
They are beneath the ocean,
Fragments and memories of them,

My people from a forgotten era.
Tell them I am here.
Tell them I am waiting.

September 2016

illustration by “planet user”, shared under creative common license.

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