Pheromone Dark Age
LEGEND HEAVY
Stable admission for luxuriant office parks
and the wellbred siamese the color of high mountain
for decadent musing, for hypermnesia,
and escaping in nested time-shrouds.
Required violent pulse to shed the hull
as hallway, as elevator body, as job haver.
Men who cannot make the money.
Upkeep of moribund family wreath.
Upkeep of trite legend heavy with blackout.
To the failed resuscitation
and the explanation of the stroke.
She will not even know that she will never
think again.
Finally an insect, cornered and emitting
fear as a frequency that will spawn carnival dreams.
Headed to big cheap windows
in the municipality of shifting code.
Bighearted yet lazy. Ambitious yet amused
by anything that has the audacity to happen.
The failure of direction.
The intense scrawling of the mapmaker.
The smoke symbols of states that vanish
into the very medium used to report
their existence.
Beauties from the southern sprawl.
Opalescent evening and actually kissing
in the rain
only to precipitate
the arrival of another boss
who will not guarantee your promotion.
A body given to the logo.
A child given to the stranger.
A lover given to the night.
The stacking of KIA
will sound like a fire in the breeze.
PHEROMONE DARK AGE
According to who.
And when.
The metric.
The ruler.
How recent.
On what disk.
In what memory.
In what time zone.
By whose decree.
And the tone.
The spectrum.
In what era.
Through what language.
In what dialect.
Under whose grammar.
How incandescent
the dust.
Using what tool.
By what brand.
For whose direction.
In which cycle.
On what chemical.
The temperature.
The pressure.
The tone
of the masses.
Which meme.
The mimetics.
The dogma.
The consensus
of what
does that mean.
In the shadow
of what tragedy.
In the aftermath
of that equation.
In the dream
of which body
remembered
by who
in what era.
In what form.
In what agreement.
On which page.
The footage. The found.
Whose kid.
The recording.
The tablet.
Archeologist.
Pothead.
The video.
The player.
The final
answer
gone
dementia.
Whose diagnosis.
In what country.
Before which war.
By whose definition.
Whose calendar.
Whose plan.
Majority.
Statistic.
Lost note.
Now found.
Ancient quote.
Translated by who.
Compared to what.
When. And translated again.
Asleep. Awake.
Neither. Both.
Caffeine.
Gamma ray.
Voltage.
No dementia
now.
In love.
Under hate.
Testimonial.
Plague.
Witness.
Injection number.
Recipe
epoch.
Which airline.
Which designer.
Which people.
Pheromone. Dark age.
The culture.
The microculture.
The bacterium.
The truth.
When.
THE EVERGREEN PARTY
Addicts of love stunted in technological foul-sweep.
Muttering complacencies and reduced narratives
boiled to hard pucks and thrown like flaming bottles.
Insouciant, cataracted, blown to pollen shards
to stand intubated in residential homogenies
and to summon carbon ghosts in the elixir of bent gloaming.
Refracted to white wall and its vein of brick
but lost in the body shadow chaotic by headlight.
Preparing electric coffins in money-pulsed tropic
and drifting to the eastern abyss of a pyrite and tungsten lobby.
The men are circled about the red coals like a nest of hearts
beneath the bridge that is a conduit for voice and etheric steel.
A roman medallion and six rubies found in the nike shoebox.
Longtongued, dyspeptic, catalogued and bailed
and a golem in the paper residue of the evergreen party.
Singing at the end of the rails, distorted name
in the squealing nonsense of the demented aunt, now housed.
Fortuitous and fat, gout and gastro, little kids running
with flowers in their hands, fractal pearl, scalloped,
and your mind rings before the phone does.
Certain porches of ill-repute, the dawn is orange in two chambers
and every fifth trunk is heavy with automatic weapon.
The video of cord cutting, the acid of the ER doctor,
walking straight into the water like a fallen sky.
Never a hum but moaning in the bleed of condensation,
in the neurotic hope of peace in the standstill of ignited reeds.
The snow of atavistic cartography, corner neon,
delineated communication and the vessel of opaque blue honey.
THE HONEY LOCUST
The coins of blood
thrown down the stairwell
lead me to the man on the street
who is holding a blue football helmet
by the facemask
and calling my landlord
a faggot.
Worth and value are born in the belly.
Sweat is the measurement
and the anguish of polar mornings.
One flare of blood on the wall.
Lesions becometh
on the day of the hot date.
Pearl attributes in the sky
and phytoplankton.
The mystery religion
of the ailments in a concussed
friend who will comfort
his own neck
in the heat of the white reactor
and the shade of the honey locust.
Women everywhere.
Always tan. Always young.
Always standing beside
a deafmute moron boy.
There is nothing to be done
with either one.
People are dragging luggage
encapsulating
dead twins.
The calisthenics
did nothing.
Nor the acupuncture
or the video of magical words.
She has to make the clothes
look alive.
Exhausted lovers
in behemoth
public works.
Between here, hopeful VIP.
Drowned in chorus.
Forgotten and ignored
and drifted and standing
in a mound of sawdust, in the clean hallway.
THE LATEST STRAIN OF THE BLOODFRUIT
The interior of the tortoiseshell that is the roof of your mouth
—you will touch the light of the expectant user.
Conferred and transferred to harmonious elevations
by the crimson paragraph
by busstop literature
by the failed caricatures of your father
scratched into the opaque glass.
Humbled in the windstations of the grid.
The bloodfruit has been pulverized and drawn into the city pipes,
the reflection of the blinking red light in the meadowland water
has hardened into the latest strain of the fruit.
Coalesced in airport memories.
Crushed and mimeographed by iron age machines lubricated with kiwi oil.
Laughter a spoiled air, a distressed humming embryo of pure static.
You are crouched and dispossessed below sports television,
cucumber slices on black discs of leaked moisture summon
the image of a pile of school chairs.
This means the abscess has finally arrived on your
most believable mask,
the one that distorts its reflection
through an ancient configuration of microplastics,
which have been found in the placentas of
unborn babies.
Michael Borth is a writer from the Hudson Valley. His work has been published in Fence, Expat Press, New World Writing, and elsewhere. He can be reached here.