I’m in public again
and writing a poem
about the man in a fishing vest
who is watching Rihanna videos
One after another
I’m afraid I’ll be disinvited
from many more parties
because I canceled my internet
and I can’t control my despair
I’d like to grow cauliflower
successfully / to steam it
to near transparency / to eat it
and absorb all its nutrients
I’m not doing that
Often I feel a strong desire
to drink nothing but water
for several weeks
I’m not doing that either
I understand patterns
I don’t understand
needing to understand all of them
One evening I noticed
that every dog in the dog park
was lit with a similar LED device
The way a dog runs
at night is different
I expect we just wanted to see
The news wants me to forget
how to fall in love
with the blue hydrangeas
going rotten on my warped deck
Nothing has changed
Every day
we rediscover the benefits
of fresh fruits and vegetables
and wonder
if rainbows are cheesy
I get a lot of pleasure
from making spare house keys
and keeping them all
on a single ring
I want to be useful
and to think useful thoughts
and to believe that others
would encourage me to
As it is
people act like language
is cake / or an orchid
But it knows how
to be something else
The New World arrived
when we were unconscious
It laid on top of the Old World
like vellum paper
and showed us what we’d done
There was no one to blame
because everyone was an institution
and therefore subject to rules
There were many new documents
we felt compelled to sign
There was still fresh juice
though we regarded it skeptically
The New World shined
brighter / and was
Red became a color
for the first time in decades
Heat came from humans
who were just pure energy
Food grew faster
and more anonymously
Eventually
The New World split itself
between ideology and action
It made new images
and reproduced them
Many of these images
were of a much Newer World
we hadn’t gotten to yet
There was a feeling permeating
all of us / a sleepy memory
of having moved beyond
the moment of choice-making
without having made
a choice at all
The New World for example
was not a singular decision
It was an adjacent performance
Long and slow
Still
I watched it sometimes
when there was nothing else on
Something to clean the house
or prepare food with
Otherwise it was just me
And how quiet it gets then
Kelly Schirmann is a writer, musician, ceramicist, and visual artist from Northern California. She is the author of Popular Music and the co-author, with Tyler Brewington, of Boyfriend Mountain and Nature Machine. Her music projects include headband (solo), Sung Mountains (with Jason Fiske), and Young Family (with Sam Pink). She is the founding editor of Black Cake, a record label for contemporary poetry and other experiments, and the co-creator of OMO, Public Access and Friendship Collective. Other projects include Americans for Responsible Technology (A.R.T.), Idea Book, and Human/Website. She currently lives in Arcata, California.
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