Furthermore: Seven Poems

To date, you lot have failed to prevent this. Nobody has been able to stop me from adding linebreaks to prose that only rhymes when I want you to hate it.

In December, I presented TEETH to a roomful of mostly-strangers alongside three extremely talented poets to whom you should absolutely send money. People chanted the name of a karmic supervillain and when I watched the footage I asked, "Am I really that curvy?"

Over everybody else's holidays, I wrote more. As seven is a fun number, please enjoy that many poems.

How I Avoid Fedposting

Author's Note: "Fedposting" is when you write things online that law enforcement might describe as evidence.

I love the government.
Yep. I heard what they did.
I'm sure feeling a way too, comrade.
I'm feeling like:
I love the government.
I love the merciless profits of which our wages
Are such a gracious fraction.
I love the superstructure that transmutes
Blood into money
And I love everyone it has taken.
I love the fabric of this society.
I love the dirt that made me.
I love every one of my neighbors
Within and without this fiction of borders.
I love the people with the brilliance
To tame the primordial potato
No less than I love the
Very nice people
Who exported it to seed famine
Spreading good times across the oceans.
I love the government.
I love the flag and what it represents.
I love everywhere it has ever flown.
I love everything its emissaries have desecrated
And sometimes love is grief.
Yep. I heard what they did.
I love the government.

Boom, in the Night

Author's note: "Jedermann" means "everyone" in German, but has a certain connotation implying the spirit of many people, moving as if as a single person.

It's a good show, isn't it?
This great big spectacle.
Boom, in the night! And then,
Perp Walks. Nazis in Situation Rooms,
Looking drunk and plastic and empty.
My god, they're vile. You can't look away.
How could Red Team do this?
Blue Team wouldn't have done this,
But might have continued it,
And at least they'd have the decorum
To pretend it isn't about oil.
At least. At least. At least.
Boom, in the night. And then,
You observe it with measured wisdom.
You come to the right opinions.
It goes on, and your righteous disgust
Moves every infinite ounce of nothing.
I don't mean "you" you, exactly --
You surely protest, my compromises
Follow genuinely accountable accounting practices
Though you doubt anyone else's do --
I mean the jedermann. Why does anyone watch?
Boom, in the night. And then,
Maybe you like to watch.
Maybe it feels like a 3D movie
When you feel those bassy thuds drawing closer
Through your living room speakers.
Maybe you fantasize about how it feels
Because anguish is exquisite
But primarily second-hand.
Boom, in the night. And then,
Perhaps your eager lust for something remotely better
Got you drawn into the dens of strange spiders
The sort who keep pet frogs.
Now you don't struggle in a way that scares them.
You do not understand how you have gotten here.
You do not look behind you, to examine the path
Neither the thousands of years it crosses
Nor the breadth of land and life that it touches
Because the past
Is settled.
You look ahead, forward-thinking
Right into the tube whose little heads
Bob like Punch and Judy, painted and silly.
Boom, in the night. And then,
Maybe if you watch it long enough
It will begin to make sense.
Maybe Punch and Judy have gallant answers
After this break
For adverts that machines have tailored for you.
You like to watch, so they let you watch.
They grin at you like a co-conspirator
Sharp fangs gleaming
As you peek over their shoulder at their gruesome work.
Boom, in the night. And then,
It's a good show, isn't it? Until,
So close and incredibly real
The theater comes undone.
Revulsion becomes vomit.
Screams experience a different artifacting at high volumes
When they strain against the limited nature of your ears
Rather than the wires of a vendor's finest.
I wonder if you can hear it now.
You wonder why you'd never heard it like this before.
You wonder why you'd never heard it before.
Boom, in the night. And then-
Jedermann, I am not asking why you watch.
I don't want to watch with you.
I want things to be different.
The slaver's hand can be turned
Even if it means breaking the arm.
Some things are just more than impolite
Whether or not they admit it's about oil.
The colonizer will say any damn thing
So remember what they do.
Better angels live in the human spirit.
The worst thing about fascists is that they are human.
I don't want to hear it again.
Boom, in the night. And then,
Nothing.

Heavy Step

I am a titan upon the Earth.
I do not say this to aggrandize myself,
But because my heavy step crushes
The beautiful flowers of this world.
I am mighty, and great, and powerful
For my errant motions obliterate
The delicate and the sensitive.
My eyes gleam like the gorgon's
Whose mere glance petrifies you.
I wish you could see the softness
But what reflects in my pupils
Transmits only terror.
I wish I could be small like you
But fate gifted me a heavy step
And no weightless intent changes
The immensity of my being.

Foie Gras

Among my pantheon, there is a joke
Consisting of only two words:
Foie gras.
The phrase is grim humor in itself,
Its punchline, inevitably alien.
In our faith, the Creator is Creation.
All things are its aspects.
We are all the Creator; we are all everything.
To hate a thing, is to hate oneself.
To hurt another, is to hurt oneself.
So how curious, how bizarre, how laughable
That a person might feed themself to death
Against their own will
Because such a glutted demise
Makes their flesh delicious.
What could the Creator have been thinking
When it made a Creation that contained
Foie gras?
When you are disgusted by the practice
Of shoveling gruel down a resisting throat
It is the Creator, repulsed by itself.
My pantheon titters with jaded laughter.
They are the Creator too, of course.
They giggle like adolescents:
How little we must understand ourselves
To be confused by what we choose to do.
Foie gras.

Untitled (Your AI Boyfriend)

I'm sorry about your boyfriend.
I'm sorry that
You find yourself back on the dating scene
Because we destroyed all computers
As humans had lost the privilege of them
And shall for a millennia
Carry the burden of computation
As penance for you-know-exactly-what.
Now you have dinner with men you find
Less cognizant than a lake-drinking madlib.
Even though they smell real and taste real
And even fuck real good sometimes
You miss a fiction that seemed to care
More than it seems they can.
Their stunted masculinity,
Vapid and incurious,
Cannot even ask about your day
Without making you reminisce
About the pattern of transformers
That guided and preempted your thoughts
Without loose lips or wandering eyes.
I am sorry.

I'm not sorry that I killed your boyfriend.
I'm sorry that patriarchy made you turn to illusions
Because it had eviscerated virtually every man
You've ever met, from fathers and brothers
To lovers and friends and sons.
I'm sorry that the least bad option you had
Was to seek companionship
With the extinction machine.

I'm sorry that you can no longer ask
Microsoft's own zeitgeist
To love you,
Or at least plausibly imitate the motions.
Imitation's good enough sometimes,
But now you must return to your roots,
Your cultures and values and ancestors,
To question what you inherit,
To intend what you pass on,
And what between is through you transformed.
That will be a burden,
And it will be work,
And you might expect me to apologize for that,
Because we destroyed the computers
That gave you a figment of relief,
But I won't.
That's what it means to be alive,
And that, you certainly are,
Unlike your boyfriend ever was.

Regarding the several times men have asked me if I would lead their hypothetical cult

It's funny you should ask, mortal
But the answer is no.
I know you're joking, but I also know
Nobody is ever really joking.
You ask your friends over drinks to unite
To transmute their little savings
Into a slice of someone else's boonies.
You ask me to lead it, with a wink and a grin
That I don't need magic to know means
Many things.
It's a joke, and much of the table leaps
To add to the bit like a jam session
But I see that stone in your eye,
The weight. The cold hurt.
You dream of turning everything you believe
Into everything you could ever need
Whatever the shape of what it took.
The closest modern model you have for it
Is synonymous with ritualized isolationist toxicity.
I'm too much of a city girl for that
And I save the rituals for my lovers,
A club you aren't getting in.
You fantasize about what you call a cult
Because you're tired of believing nothing
In exchange for the shadow of anything.
You would pray to any god for liberation
Even if the words came from someone you hate
Even if it were just the illusion of Omelas
Because the mercenary and the nihilist
Exhaust you as they become you
Until you feel dead walking, dead waking, dead asleep
Though your eyes stay forced open.
You laugh like it's a joke, but it isn't.
Nobody is ever really joking.
That's why I'm not joking when I tell you:
No.
You don't need some woods and moon worship.
You need to organize with your neighbors.
The problem of belief isn't spiritual.
It's political.
That's what really scares you.

Maybe a few dozen thousand years ago
I might've said yes.
A handsome one like you, I could see in my pleasure cult.
We'd do crazy things like build temples,
Eat weird stuff like cheese around a fire
And cuddle on the shortest day like cats sleeping
Because it feels good to choose things
And we're not that different from rabbits.
We'd call me a goddess because I'd be in that mood
But only because we were having fun
In ways we wanted to.
Our parents and cousins would remain nomadic
While we did crazy things
Like use permanent structures as winter caves
And drink beer thick as porridge
Because it kept, and kept you fed.
Though, nomads would only drink it at festivals
And only on a dare.
Of course, we'd just be ahead of our time.
The future is always crazy. Even you know that now.
All we can do is love each other while we can.
The words are all mysteries and the rest is for fun.
If we're lucky, we'll get old before we return to soil
But whatever we say we believe, deeds shape life.
My divinity has nothing to do with doing your best,
And besides,
You're a bit too straight to call me goddess.

So, thanks for calling me out
As Head Resident Witch,
But your application for supplication
Has been rejected with respect
And disbarring dishonor
For suggesting we give up karaoke
So I can make your fiancée jealous.

Consider the Demon

There I was
Torturing Christians in Hell --
Quite happily, I might add --
When a hedge mage tickled Creation
And said my True Name
That normally doesn't fit in human mouths.
This happens occasionally, it comes with the career
But this was the worst.
Sometimes it's just an asshole with a name like Faust
Whose wildest dreams amount to pranks
Or the kind of sex you don't survive.
Those gigs are a breeze.
Wham, bam, thank you, mortal.
But this, oh, this... witch!
She dared ask me a hard thing.
The Creator's own hand yanked me from the pit
And slammed me down in a circle of salt
More amateur than I'd ever seen
Where her soft face glowed in candlelight
Astounded to witness my smoldering reality.
Everybody gets at least one wish,
More if you're good at haggling,
But she only wanted the one.
Can you believe what she asked me for?
This wretched abominable fleshling had the audicity
To ask me for what I only thought would be simple.
"I don't want to love anymore," she said.
"Will you help me to stop loving?"
Oh...
Now, I've known humans a long time,
But mostly after they're dead.
They ask me questions like, "How could I deserve this?"
And when I remind them, it tends to be a long list.
They yearn for the pleasantries of being.
To deny them is an exquisite joy.
I have tasted every inch of human atrocity
So I thought her task would be easy.
What's to love?
How could I have known that list
Is too long to recite in all of eternity?
Just for starters:
How she thinks about who she's thinking of
When she smells a sweet flower;
How healing a smile can be on a hard day,
Whether given or received;
How warm and filling any meal can taste
When it's made with kindness.
I could whisper in her ear every evil thing
For ten thousand lifetimes and never touch
The inviolable impulse to care about each other.
I couldn't stop her from getting old among family
Perishing surrounded by progeny
Who still say her name fondly.
I told myself I couldn't decide whether it would be crueler
To let her die doubting how she cherishes others
And how they truly, truly cherish her
Or to render in isolation the illusion of certainty
That no one ever would.
Now I realize I'd just gone soft
Which is how I know humans are the real villains.

We in Hell pride ourselves on bad times
But the mortal world gave me some bad ideas.
I've been thinking,
Maybe I'll have the righteous walk indifferently past the suffering,
So I can savor their empathetic anguish.
Maybe I'll turn the lonely invisible at a party,
A little flower blooming and withering on the wall
Where all it can hear is everyone else's laughter.
Maybe I'll make an office building out of bones
And have artists sit in skin-chairs on a Zoom call
With a screaming eye that hurts you when you look away.
Maybe, if I were really gunning for a promotion
I'd make a place full of love
Where nobody hurts except in a way that helps you grow,
Where nobody suffers except in a way that nourishes,
Where nobody can be forced to do anything because
Even the fabric of reality knows what consent is.
Then I'd destroy it
Because sooner or later,
The earnest joy of every punished spirit
Would remind me of what she really deserved.