I’ve been bad.
What I’ve Learned
I’m deprogramming the functions of my limbic system. It’s largely a pruning process really. I am passing new variables to be a better animal.
—one last song of summer—
One pair of gloves can last longer than a man’s love.
for Seamus Heaney
My reward circuit has been hacked. My amygdala has constrained the attribute of happiness to women. Now disassociated, I am interpolating love.
A home is an island that must be fed and cultivated daily.
I am rewiring the executive functions of my frontal lobe. The cognitive classes I have constructed are erroneously connected to my base self. They confirm my BIOS. My love has been object oriented, projected onto the perky, perverse, and risqué. I am now the object to which I am oriented, reprogrammed to project my own pixels. I am a part and purveyor, both apart and parcel.
On subways, eyes conceal and shoes reveal all souls. Baudelaire’s windows, his eyes, crept inside souls crusty with scabs.
a green-grey turtle pushes out from the lee shore rippling and bubbling the water a toy boat on an enormous hammering sea
I have been executed; I am in process, running rampant. What is hard equals what I add it up to be. In a flash, I’m unzipped; initiated, I’m so ready to mount.
The shadows things cast should remind us to thank the sun.
My central sulcus has explored her superior gyri, sensing gyrating signals with my digits, my probatory tendrils. They traversed her, decoded her information, and brought me to a solid state.
—Jan Castro
dying in a pall of light
Floating on Faith
the trees dance
My tube is analog; it cannot be quantified completely; though, relative to severely, it pulsates, throbs, and gravitates toward quite nearly anything other than me. i, an iteration, a function for set; she, among we, just yearning for a bet. Probability abandoned me and .05 percent means little more than nothing plus buzzing panties at the MET.
Doubting Thomas came to believe and cast himself upon the sea. He never did buy the part about walking on water but he sure could float.
My parietal is preprogrammed to lose itself. I am neither hither nor dithered. I am a blotch, a blip, a blit.
—Darlene Rivais
My temporal lobe is merely another transistor, a gate for transient truths, momentary expressions soon to be transferred to memory. I am a switch, turned on to turn her out.
I Phone
Her defaults are dirty, sincere and surreal, passed through for the world wide wonder to pine and to deal. I have spawned millions of nanomes, would be progeny, into oil rags: all the lube, none of the fuss, bits of my programming drying in the corner, bytes in half, collecting dust. Her cache is sketchy. Her history went viral and her cookies are crumbling. I am left dejected, and only for asking to lock up .dat ASCII. Was my query really so queer? Her returns quickly turned ridiculous. At high speed, my connection rerouted to a perkier proxy. The vision is riveting. When she’s bare, her radial variability causes my vectors to bend and flex, blur and vex. 100,000 neurons per voxel, my picture is pixelated. I need to attenuate; I need to atone. Wild while loops clutter my logic. If only statements leave me longing and alone. My brain is being debugged so I can be a better bot. —Christian King
Untitled sky disintegrates into light, into clouds, and on hills, shadows.
because we can’t be together we have this but why can’t we be together —Richard Donnelly
The Love Poem As I’m a writer, words mean more to me Than anything of worth, not even gold Could take away my pen; to be so bold I’d even sell my soul before I’d be Left speechless, but all words begin to flee When blood inside my veins is running cold At feelings unrequited when I’m told That love cannot survive this heresy. If I could have one wish it’d be a poem That made you love me now as I love you; That just for one sweet day you’d feel it too And make my heart your resting place and home; But even if I wrote the longest tome You’d feel it not, so this will have to do.
the mist is thick but rising
sparks of dandelion flit about the tall grass silently moving in the wind. —E Gironda Jr
Magnolia i am so evolved appearing before the bees encouraging madness— why else would i unfurl on bare branches— if leather feels like a leaf, then watch my startlets fall! —Michelle Diano
Autumn Reflections Field full of pumpkins each one still attached to its umbilical cord He sharpens his beak on the metal shopping cart— sparrow in autumn Into the clear pond along with dozens of leaves the clouds have fallen
—Robert Kilcrease —Priscilla Lignori
—Nick Greenleaf 10/13 ChronograM poetry 79