Breadcrumb #431

SERGIO SATÉLITE

Motivation waits for me
with a cold glass of water.
I split my blue pills into breadcrumbs.
I cannot pray. So I drink.

Mine is a kind of voluptuous self-consumption
with its quasi-predictable-dance
between stimulus and response.
I drift. I float in my wishy-washy déjà vu-ing.
Too often, I seem unable to change.

A gunfight breaks out in the ship of Theseus.
17 against 25. God dies in the helicopter.
Purpose plummets with a hole in its temple.
And I. I Alone. Escape to tell you the news.

You fooled me once. Shame on you.
I fool me every day. Year after year.
Until your mother’s mustache gets sweaty.
What then? Long, hot showers? Is there a “beyond-the-circles”?

Why do we keep delaying putting away our ninja turtles?
Re-committing to Proust? Fixing the Venezuelan economy
and growing into the philosopher-kings our teenage versions
once fashioned for ourselves out of AM-radio-theologies?

Somebody has to go down on the Statue of Liberty.
Somebody has to perform open-mic surgery on this baby, baby.
Somebody has to plug the world back
into this drooling, dissociative unit.
Don’t you understand, Steven?
Somebody has to kill the babysitter.

• • •

Breadcrumb #281

LISA MARIE BASILE

For M.

When did this violet come                     
                                    to take you away?
It shifts in places we cannot know. As roots below the earth
                        of gold.
Let me hold you
                        in water,      of water.
Let me wash you
            from this coil.
Of suffering, you aspirate all over that yellow light
             & white coverlet;
                        a collapsing. Even the summer broke
            to you. How the fight
becomes kingdom. How dark blood
            becomes clean once it stops running. 
                        Weep now.
How life is a temperance of tears,
                        but not now. Now you can water your threshold.
You only have to make one decision:
            the salt of the earth
                        or fire.
You only have to sleep. You choose fire.
            You do not have to breath.
Your organs are not chosen.
You go when you are not awake,
            we wake when you have gone.
                        Your skin is free from poison.
                        In the smallest hours of night
I bend my knees.                They take your skin with them.
Of day I lay my head upon the ground.
            I crawl from water to land to mourn you.
                        They give your skin to those who need it.
You are the sound that lasts on and on, pulling
     us through its veil.

• • •