Hôtel Liminal
The camera builds me
patiently and instantly
My village of one
still requires hearse and crematorium
Are you the lampshade to my overpass?
There is no lampshade to my overpass
They thought I was strange to walk the hour’s way
to a glass and timber church
only to take pictures
and not to pray
And now that the hotel balcony is going to collapse under the weight
of my consciousness, I finally allow Google to track my location
into the afterlife
We go to the holiday party and talk about the holiday party
We go to work and talk about work
We watch football and talk about football
I want to lavish abandon of photon and pigeon alarm clock, wake up
I want to listen to glass shatter in slow motion while reading a treatise on optics
I watch football and think about the lens of black glare, take me there
The family in the lobby asks me to take a picture of them sprawled out on a Santa Claus
I take the picture with my own phone and walk away
and they say no that’s not what we meant
but I am already in a different season
doing the same thing to a family
sprawled out on an Easter Bunny
They were dead (like us)
sitting there in chairs equidistant
from the sun
The camera built them
patiently and instantly
And not to pray
Dilation
I don’t bite
but I won’t be in tomorrow
and I won’t be attending the office party
but in any case
I feel that just about anything might happen in the very next moment like
I might take out the trash
to avoid arrest
of a cardiac nature
because my heart’s been locking eyes
with all that my body
disposes of
even though I assure it
it will be the last to go
last night I played a song for my brother
and he said it sounded like what he thought the future was going to be
before whatever this is that fits in our palms
woke up and rewrote the laws
and by this he meant that the song was good
and it was stolen,
the future that vanished into the labyrinth of our present
but I still love it
the same way I can love a fictional character
and by the way by labyrinth
I mean the innermost part of the ear
where the plot, or something,
thickens into sense
it’s all coming back to me now
the numbness of all extremities
opening up its eyes
to the pain that is the painlessness
of ordinary being, which like Bowie
is of two hemispheres: one blue sky holding hands
with a permanently dilated pupil
and for a time my own right pupil had a greater diameter than the left
like the very locus of eroticism
the result of my friend Daniel
trying to shove me
into oncoming traffic on Burnside
we fought on the sidewalk for a little while
he knocked my Royals flatbill off
and it landed in a puddle
we might have fought to the death
had a cop not broken it up
and later we defrauded McDonald’s
through its broken app
and over free milkshakes
Daniel touched his split lip
with his tongue and said
I’m sorry for trying to kill you
Across the Country Strange
across the country strange
things are happening
my grandmother says
into the phone two hours
fifty-one minutes away as I walk
along the decapitated wall where
a lost cabbage butterfly trembles
and the sidewalk barely allows
me and a forward-staring woman
to pass each other in the ninety
eight percent humidity I am still
not used to, the herniated guts
of overambitious constructions
chambering all our informed
and yet unmade decisions
sending them screaming
down the cardboard
squared whorls
of the amazon
boxes that
litter the
grass of
this old
dead
lot
to
the
west
of my
heart
