Sand Reckoner
The supplement that mines
a fear that I can recognize
It has the feel of plastic
& at the same time, I guess it feels
screws, electrical tensions
plates, joints, plates,
plates, parts
It is this kind of thing
that makes me angry
every time I think about it
At the mall by the beach
we cache songs, count
steps up the broke escalator
we hear the tick-tock achieve
its sucrose lull, time
emboldened by the feeling
of popularity alone
In the cold car
the voice of the county
comptroller we met
in the retort stream
We are the abandoned offer of gratitude
the sweet shit we dreamed of & waited for
the lover’s point of the war
10 Days in Hell
I’m getting very depressed right now
But it’s not like “oh look it’s just like yesterday”
I never think that way
with or without a snuggle
Now counting the ticks
the tickle
the tickles in presence of hollering
Is this a gift from above
a mark of respect
or a halo around the neck
We do not yet know what kind
of creature fashioned this feeling
understandable/catatonic/three-dimensional
the anonymous passage of warmth
from one body to another
I’m sorry, that’s an unfortunate allusion
I’m mad because you
can walk right through me
Ph. D., Not Yet, LATER
The sycamore prints will wait
(some tender solar wind rushed
in to clear a layer of impurity)
We make pit-stops to buy time
for further defectors, catch them up on
news & pass around a joint, just knowing
we will be overpowered
by a vast undisclosed mud
& to be fair, the news is not intently physical
b u t r a t h e r a n u g l y & p r o l o n g e d
arrangement of interfacial interfaces
Faceless or explanatory (such as flat earths or skyscrapers)
The interfaces are there because Homo sapiens is blankly drawn to human-like contra-forms
of perception & behavior, which are not lost on those few reptiles with anthropomorphic eyes
Notice how, as the argon dating for the first human reached every urbanite who watched
the clone swap stories in the press, the income made available to the aristocracy
of appearance shifted to the next adjunct to decode cryptic audits
All this without the handymen ever seeming to have an inner need to
question or falsify observation
Joseph Mosconi is a writer and taxonomist based in Los Angeles. He co-directs the Poetic Research Bureau and is the author of several books, including Ashenfolk (Make Now Books, 2019), Fright Catalog (Insert Blanc Press, 2013), Demon Miso/Fashion In Child (Make Now Books, 2014), Renaissance Realism (Gauss PDF, 2016), and, with Pauline Beaudemont, an artist book called This Arrogant Envelope (FCAC Geneva, 2017).
