[1]

Jagged little pixels
                              of dumped memories
               line ghost-lit walls of my pain’s data-dried mind /

                              dead gods waltz in the wiring of these vain machines
                                             we call our lives,
                                             writhing off all of the suffering /

                                        clogging the exit we fail to recognize,
                                             which, if it closed its tags as it quoted itself,
                                                       could repopulate the condemned village /

                         global epidemics decimated,
               breaking into ten pieces that term’s real meaning,
                         that behemoth of a holographic
                                             synthesis where our dreams mixed /

          and from which our imagined children vanished,
                                        the fallout of their absent love alone outweighs
                         our patriarchal pretense of procreation: /

                                                                 creating, because we can, a planet
                                                                                swollen with duplicates, recipients of awe
                                                                                carbon-copied
                                                       on the same subject /

                                                                                as we were when deities incorporated
                                             and licensed us, marketing tools
                                                                 made of flesh but in their image; /

               pitiful pixels married and divorced
in, and from, the same picture,
                         we form that fallout of ours which alone
                         outweighs all redundant copies /

                                             of my path my hands mapped
                                        onto your bared topography—that blaring pornography
                                        of a file I silently clicked to accept, which,
                                                       across seven time zones, shed its veils as it crept,
                              as if Salomé had gone digital, scaled my fire’s wall,
                                             and leapt into my sweating lap;
                                                                 all I had to be was willing,
                                                       all you had to give was a link to tap— /

                                                                                               where memories lapse,
                                                                      only partially can it be recalled
                                                                                what I circulated aboard your body’s
                                                                 mutinous bounty, /

          words about my disk in its depths
typed in innocence but spread by piracy //

                                             [2]

                              spread-thighed romance scrolled down
               as from heaven into single-handed typography, /

                                             ‘i’m not your muse, don’t let your work define me..’
                                             as your message, backed by its aborted ellipsis,
                                                                 denied me /

transfiguring grief as my reply
          failed mid-transmission, your server rejecting
          my heart’s pouring out like a butler
                         in gas-lit London—or an outsourced, mid-wage,
                                        Third World operator—not accepting my calling card; /

                                                                 an outrage of an outage,
                                                                                               this outing of my hidden self,
                                                                                shelved within invisible layers of thoughts /

                                                                                               every denial of my worth
                                                                      purged and eventually put up,
                                             posted by tyrant eyes for tigers to devour online /

                                                                      a quickening ferociousness
                                                                      of precocious parents’-basement audiences
                                                                                pouncing on that one line
                                                                 on which I opined during my time,
                                        “in-real-life,” in a prison of mannequins
                                                       melting under the lies that they were my peers
                                             and that they would be for the rest of their lives,
                                             that line my fears prohibited me from saying, that /

                         ‘i understand if you don’t feel the same, but i’m gay’—
                                        things such as that laid on message boards,
               wounded words doctored and paged,
                                             incised on seamless stretchers
                              coded to deliver information painful or
                                             pleasurable, chatted about for hours in virtual hospitals,
                                                                 wide world-weary rooms without walls /

          fibres of truth spun without care
                         on a globe with no balls,
fiber-optical delusions boxing in my soul
               with your memes and your mores and avatars
                                        scrubbed of morals /

                                                       convincing me then,
                                                                      as I remain convinced now,
                                        that you and your kind are all cannibals
                                        of a different time; /

               your quirky teeth QWERTY keys
                              with which you eat animals, our beating hearts
                              the missing part /

                              computers lack, but even screens
can be stabbed, those windshields of your ritual
               vehicles smashed, so like actual people must, you should
                                             watch your back.