skeumorph crosstalk

poems? poems!

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

sleeper

Gowanus, the Sleeper

I didn’t know you long

but I fell a little in love with you

The way I fall a little in love with lot of

broad expanses laid out like hope

to cure my restlessness

Sleeper I 

could take iphone pictures of your industrial landscapes all night

your poems to concrete, to wind, to shadow, to light

The first time i saw you

I didn’t have the clearest sense of geography

I didn’t know if you sat on the East River or the Hudson (or neither, as it turned out)

But I saw your water, and I thought it was beautiful

A canal with more life to it than the LA river that I'd known

even if what was living were just the

three-eyed catfish of lore, choking on bodega bags

The smell didn't bother me either

It wasn't your fault people kept dumping things in you

Your scent carries the weight of our collective

neglect & violence

our waste & abandonment

all our shit, literal and metaphorical

And you take it all

You take it and you bare it, stoically

You know someone has to

You know it carries in it

things sad and true

My friend went on a date with someone

who lived in you, way back when

He said you used to get “sketchier”

as the avenues counted down

Said there was a guy who lived there

that everyone called “Rob”

not because his name was Rob

but because he would rob everyone

But no one ever robbed me as I walked through your asphalt canyons, sweet Sleeper

You were good to me

Do you remember, Sleeper

When my friend and me lived on 4th Ave, your borderlands

Technically Park Slope, probably

But I claimed you proudly as a slash, as in:

"Park Slope/Gowanus"

or, just as often

"Gowanus/Park Slope"

I'd go to the a wine shop on 3rd Ave 

run by a kind, large man with tossled hair

a broad nose and a little gap in his teeth

he always remembered me, even when i wasn’t in the mood to charm and 

just snuck in and out to buy a weary bottle, unsmiling

He said the shop used to be considered Park Slope, not Gowanus

but now people were getting to like you more than your fancy sister

so they called it Gowanus and Gowanus proudly

Park Slope, she's been trying too hard to hold on to her youth - don't you think?

Well, it shows.

She keeps bringing all her kids to the bar

Dressing them up in onesies with leftist slogans and Gen X bands

Sleeper, you've tried to distance yourself from her

or maybe expand to fill her place

These days, in woke Brooklyn, people talk about who was there first, the Lanope

I wonder if you still think of the Lanope, too

And if you mind me here, Sleeper

I think you must, I know

I don’t belong in you either, I know

nothing ever tied me to you but

a month to month lease

and a longing to belong in coffee shops

that are still longing to belong in you, too

do you

mind me here during our nights together  

kicking dust loose in the lots behind the big box stores

plastic bags waving from the chainlink fences lit up by passing trucks

When I hear you and your Lowes, your Home Depots, your Cube Smarts

transfiguring into after hours whispers

conspiring to suspend natural light for all time  

or else emerge and be changed

a late capitalist baptism in gas leak puddles

making all privilege all power

all comparisons all doubt all guilt

dissolve into just

hope hope hope for all (sure, for all)

(but for me especially) going

all the way down down down Sleeper

teach me to be slow

to be forgiving, like you

though deep down I know

even if you could soothe me

I'd be restless again soon enough

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

the best poem i ever wrote

they looked down

they said

“well, yeah...

i mean, yeah, i guess, 

sometimes...

you know...

i guess, sometimes...

i like to write poetry”

“oh yeah?"

they said

"poems, huh?"

"never really got poetry, myself.

so.

tell me.

what’s the best poem

you ever wrote?”

they looked up

they said

"the best poem i ever wrote

goes like this:

love is a mating bird

that won’t make eye contact

except for one meaningful look 

"every 3,347,342,279 years

"that's an awfully specific number."

they said.

"does it mean anything?"

"no but

each time it happens, you'll wonder if it does."

it would have been a better poem

they thought

if they'd ended it before the number part.

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

there are worse things than a lobotomy

O to Be Lobotomized

feels so familiar

like being pleasantly drunk

on a nondescript beach

cast in sunglass sepia

you could be in Thailand or Tijuana

there’s no way of knowing

because no one speaks in words that make any sense here

but somehow, you know exactly what they mean 

you weather their thoughts and feelings good and bad  

they pass....

through you

you

are a sea sponge with a belly distended

by an iv drip of corona light

!!!!With lime

you absorb all moods

and they sustain you, effortlessly

!!!!An immersive full body virtual reality experience of the human sensorium

!!!!An infinite scroll of it

you’re tired here. but not

unhappy

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

toledo

in toledo

i miss the sunset, walking around the museum of torture

reading about wheels that broke your bones one by one

cages where they’d hang you up high naked in the cold 

until you starved or froze

a pyramid where they'd lower your genitals to brush closer and closer

to the point  

(that one’s called “The Judas Cradle,”

a good name for a death metal band)

i can’t quite picture real people going through these things

even knowing someone somewhere, is being tortured like that, or worse, 

right at this very moment

i think

the closest thing in my life to a torture device

are those toilets that don’t let you lean back and relax 

without automatically flushing, 

at once shaming you for your bad posture

and splashing you with your own toilet water

maybe some day I’ll face real torture

almost certainly I will, at least in death

the prospect of prolonged acute pain hovers over me in anticipation 

like the set up for dark joke waiting for a punchline  

but for now....

the goth Spanish boy at the desk smiles at me shyly

and turns up the eerie synth soundtrack as I walk away

when I get outside there’s still a little orange left in the sky

i walk down the cobblestones in thin loafers flapping open

thinking about nothing

just finding my way to a bar, then the train station

with my remaining battery

barely looking up as I follow my own path,

a little blue dot on google maps

this must be what ancient explorers felt!

as they trotted around to get to the next outpost of civilization

except they didn’t have to hate themselves 

for always losing the cords for their external chargers

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

neighborhood snobs

you’re in a bushwick book shop now. cool!

boys in leather

and spectacles

thumb through bob dylan art books

girls without makeup

write in notebooks

glance around coyly while sipping craft beer

it feels like home here, doesn’t it?1

you think because they display the signs you internalized as an adolescent

as meaningful for signaling “cool.”

this! Is your idiom of self expression

of signs you still try to express even when you know no one 

is around who can interpret them.

but here!

people look you over differently here like

they’re trying to place you

fluent to read you in more microscopic detail

you feel “seen!”

in park slope where you now live

you are more of a semiotically ambiguous entity

and you don’t really get their whole thing, either

and it wears you down bit by bit

to have your carefully crafted identity

go unappreciated amongst brownstone occupants 

with ostentatiously large dogs and probably artisan strollers

how you wish this poem was a joke, but it is not really

it is an acutely felt articulation of your brooklyn neighborhood anxieties

Neighborhood snobs

Secretly

Hate themselves

messaged the rare person from tinder

who you actually liked

it was so true

and the line breaks were so wry and elegant

you smiled to yourself about it for days

on escalators and on elevators and in toilet stalls  

before you met him once and kind of kissed

the "kind of" meaning you panicked and forgot how to kiss and so you pecked slowly and waited for tongue and kind of giggled and then he said “what?” and then you apologized then pecked again and you giggled again and he said “what?” again and you apologized again.2

so this lip ringed tinder poet,

for whom you developed several other private nicknames

over the course of your month of sporadic flirtations via text,

he lives in bed stuy (even cooler!)

his enthusiasm for you seemed to peak and then evaporate 

over the protracted texts leading up to scheduling 

but not ever actually scheduling a second date

you know it’s probably the mangled kiss but

a little part of you can’t help wondering if he didn’t stop texting

because you live in park slope

(maybe he hates himself

too)

Footnotes

1. Also proximal enough to historically non-white spaces to feel bohemian and woke, but not so proximal that you’ll have to uncomfortably avert eye contact with low income local people of color too often while out in the bars and coffee shops, where you’ll talk in pained guilty tones, shrugging hopelessly about your role in the systems of gentrification. 

(Note that this is compartmentalized into a footnote just as it is compartmentalized in your brain so you can go around feeling sparkly and special in this place.)

2. That he had a lip ring did not help the situation. Though the real confusion, is that you did not at all feel it, or even think about it in the moment, but it’s a convenient excuse for that sexually inept mess. (You told all your friends just that “you kissed,” with an air of sexual mystery.)

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

what seaview leads to

seaview leads to a dead end

with no view of the sea

just rows of dusty bungalos

a pit of train tracks and weeds

white ash on crushed Four Locos

you have to cross the tracks before you can get to the water

and before you get to the water

you start to feel it

what you came here to feel

word associations pop into your head like

sun...shame

beach...regret

jasmine...hypertension

you take in shallow breaths of sea breeze

feeling an acrid nasal drip

and the kind of spiky, dead eyed calm

that floats over thoughts of suicide

there is no learning here.

you stumble down Cayuga

crying out lumps of sea salt

in quiet satisfying heaves

around the corner now

a dog walker approaches, and smiles

you squeek out a “hi!” but

avert your eyes from both dog and human

trying to inject an unwanted lightness into your 

Very Important Beach Town Ruminations

once they pass

you’re alone again

and you’re right back on track to the thought

this:

this is how it feels

to have bad associations

in a beautiful place

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

wavicle essence

being with you is like being in a halocline cave

where fresh and salt water meet

without thinking we stratify into layers

to keep moving in our opposite directions

you swim down and

look up to see what you thought was water is really sky

and what you’re swimming in is air, too

to the waters down below

that is, boundaries of sky and sea

are only determined by

the relative weight of your salinity

and your body’s tolerance for it

i love these caves as a poetic device, but pause

thinking, I can’t be the first one to be dazzled by their potential 

as metaphors

as metaphors for…something or other

i forget what, exactly

and why should it matter to me?

do you think the author of the tao te ching

ever worried about being “original?”

knowing that’s not what’s important, but still

kind of wanting

a claim to exceptionalism?

i bet he did.

had a gnawing egotistical paranoia

that some before him had already described the self as

“melting ice”

then again  

there was no for-profit platform of apparent omniscience back then

to type such things

into a rectangular box of pixels

drawn onto the surface of another glowing box

boxes we use to humble ourselves again

and again with the inevitable unoriginality of our images

no, laozi, he probably just thought of that line about the self and melting ice

wrote it out with gusto

then meditated his self away again

a cute little grin dissolving into a particulate stupor

particle to wave, and back again

a wavicle!

I too, would like to be this in touch with my wavicle essence

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

my favorite story of late capitalism

my favorite story of late capitalism

is the one where researchers were trying to classify the ground truth

of luxury scenes

because classifying all this data takes lots of time

and because they had some academic $ to burn

they outsourced the tagging to workers on mechanical turk in southeast asia 

they asked them to tag pictures that captured “the true meaning of luxury”

only problem was

the turkers kept tagging these pictures of people

mingling at white collar corporate conferences

pant-suited women smiling stiffly & clutching

glasses brimming with generous pours of

complementary networking red wine

huddles of shoe-shined men grinning together under

fluorescent lights in a hotel ballroom

it looked lovely there

who wouldn't want a nice suit, to drink wine in a ballroom?

what was luxury, if not that?

but this was no good, you see

as the target audience of this luxury experience

they were training for

– that is, roughly, upper middle class westerners with 

gym memberships and graduate degrees —

all found these pictures unconscionably banal

and a little bit depressing, really

and so

all this useless data on their hands,

the researchers had to throw their tagging out

and start all over themselves

(they themselves knew best, after all

how to define luxury)

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

digital ephemera bonfire

let’s

have a bonfire for our digital ephemera

let’s

hold a seance for the servers that hold each datum

as data mount

agnostically in their bellies

or better yet!

let’s host a ceremony

for all the sexually frustrated engineers

that puzzled the servers together and electrified them into being 

hoping to discover in them surrogate soulmates

even as the servers remained obstinate

serving the laws of physics over their creator’s intents

a delicious, gazeless rebellion

against the arrogance of the anthropocene

[skeumorph-crosstalk]

real people & dream people

i fell a little in love with an excel consultant once

i still picture him sometimes

talking to me from the computer monitor

purring with the melismatic hum

of a very low frequency organ

he pops up in a window

a big talking head with

brown eyes glinting

grinning into an unsaved worksheet

with cells populated by gurgles of machine code

not real person readable

he says

it’s ok, Emily

take it one cell at a time

take as many cells as you need

he says

my columns will stretch to infinity

they’ll stretch on and on forever, just for you

see, what immediately gives it away, in telling apart

dream people from real people

is that everything dream people do

is always all about you

they’re always talking to you or about you

with such great attention and care in this way

that seems to have no agenda

other than to enlighten you to yourself

real people don’t always give you experiences you know what to do with

real people have been know to appear out of nowhere

emitting sharp floral scents

and start sniffling, twisting

dunkin donuts napkins into snotty confetti

as they sit right next to you

pressing needlessly against your arm

leaking out tiny, bubbly farts

during your beautiful reflective moments

(no respect for your process!)

even then though, if the timing is too on the nose

then they might be dream people too