1999
That summer, I was sick.
Detox. Panic. Fear of sleep.
My studies had been a success.
Now, each day, I drove for hours
getting lost among the dark corn.
Ohio. Nowhere. Far inside.
I was told I could be a sorter—
I could take home a receipt.
In a hangar, watching the slow
stream of objects the conveyor belt
poured: cosmetics, canisters of film,
Valium, crickets in a box,
a river of uses. I did the job.
Detached, I lifted each thing out,
sorting it onto its proper belt
while my nerves sent screams
across their stitched together paths.
In the surface of one rusted
metal bin, I studied scrapes
crazing like veins until the face
of nothing I knew bled through
and gave itself to the light.
Futures. Strange signatures.
A voice called me to break.
What lives on in the cracks?
Whose traces do we keep?
Dead labor. An old cassette.
The signal fed back into its own
torqued waves until the noise
breaks time apart. And wakes.
beneath a hand a bunch
of wires siphon light into a
page a crime inside a poem
a job a dying bird each dis
aster far enough apart I can
begin to breathe inside it
I walk through its mall w/
the wrong drug plugged into
my skull my head a catalogue
of dead futures stitched into
my skin & my neighbors
surrounding me in rooms &
cars a bloodstream full of
police signals received w/
perfect fidelity & terror
but no it’s nothing today
I paid bills nursed my debts
& woke up saying that
owl on the power line has
a dead rat’s poem in its mouth
3.
Contradiction is ex-military. Contradiction smashes Wonder Bread in brandy with milk and canned peaches. Walks to work. This is history. This is the meaning of one atom of time becoming the next. (Head in a jar, tree with veins.) Contradiction watches TV with a gun in hand. It’s what happens when nothing does. (His face explodes into a. His face explodes. His face.) The window looks out onto concrete. The birdshit is a kind of rain. Ashes. Gum. "Some nights I wash off the blood," etc. Alka-Seltzer and coffee. A glance like a razor. A thirty second ad for soap. Later, contradiction cases the gathering place. Hides its eyes. It won’t be going home.
8.
A nation surrounds itself with what it sells. An environment. A cortex. Whale oil. Fossil fuel. Petrochemical plastic dolls. A nervous system as a pretext for exchanges. Axon/dendrite interface. Automated Tellers. Travis moves through a war hallucination pretending to be a city. Budweiser. Ford. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Elsewhere, four Xanax, three chatrooms, an incel's grin. There is nothing scarier than crawling into James Holmes' mind and wearing his face! The city as an eye looking back at itself. The city as a war market. Aspirin. NBC. "I don't care. Don't make no difference to me."
11.
The candidate is a body. The face, named, speaks and you can reach out and shake its hand. You can feel it. At night, Travis is an engine block, a window, a meter clicking the fare. That one there: speedfreak, rapist, executive. “A person like other people.” Weathervane, laborer, john. Bretton-Woods. Coca-Cola. Rated X. The candidate’s face in the rearview, listening. “A real rain,” etc. A man in old newspapers asleep on the concrete steps. My dream was to be the Shah. To smile. To carry the future through the city, an exoskeleton, a coffin of metal and glass. Here under the sign of the Scorpion. Of the empire. Employed.
R.M. Haines
R.M. Haines is a writer and adjunct teacher living in Indiana. His full-length collection of poems, A Dark Address, is available now on Gumroad as a free PDF. More info can be found at his website, rmhaines.com.