Sometimes the light never comes in, except against
the thin laser of dust and every window is sealed shut. Each voice
muted like the conference call is happening in the room just beyond
the room, and you can’t hear the wind tumbling sticky jacaranda
petals toward the wheel. Then, the cacti blossom into Heavy
Metal alien fauna: lanceleaf liveforevers, pinkmilk carnivals—violet Cortia;
their opening estranged from the brain, which is itself
a smoothed over Krang who cannot lift a finger to fight
turtles or rat masters. Such is the way the body spins as it falls
without grace. Everyday you look into the hole and see it deepening
like the way oil mirrors nothing except a shadow form of the rainbow——
ushering in the occasional flaming geyser of desert rage,
which is really just a dim flame that can’t even boil a fly.
It all tastes acrid and the body never sleeps.
The gum loses its flavor and quickly your jaw
is sore from chewing, so you look at the baseball guy’s
dumb face——clearly a juicer in the heyday of his juicing
throbbing from a grand slam, face pinker than cocaine
until I find my own visage fragmented in sequins
on the fembot futurist gown at the museum
for the moderately rich and the actors rotate
slowly on the minimalist production of A Doll’s House,
which is probably over-adapted and too funny.
The performers refuse to hug each other, and finally
I’m out owling in the middle of the night with Oliver.
She says there is beauty in the darkest parts of the dark
like being a fish in the turtle's throat. “Humbling,” or “hum-bug,”
I say, “They’ve got your most famous works on cheap recycled
paper pumped to every standardized kit in the country.
You’re leading them toward godlessness with your talk of geese
and toads don’t eat tadpoles, but a dude will dump
frogspawn into his own pond——bucket after bucket
of black-eyed mucus strings bouncing and opaque
just for the internet, so he can wake up the neighborhood——
make the golf courses flow with a sea of dark green warts
croaking.” There at the pond edge, Narcissus kisses
his neat little form, thinking it beauty as he kneels
licking back his eyebrows and lashes with long tongue, but he doesn’t see
water skimmers or bright green ferns, or the tadpole
in its mid-most state: pure fin. Nor does he notice
how the frog almost clucks at the outermost membrane
of the child’s dream in the creekside inn, body rising slowly
in sleep, as his imaginings drift outward in an iridescent
orb like a bomb wave moving through a city in the film’s cold open.
He doesn’t see how the child scratches where his mom used to scratch.
Together we sit in the red theater and laugh, or push our legs out of the egg sac
glittering with slime——pop our bulbous eyes
toward the light at least to see everything worth seeing.

Coach teases oil
out of his dropper
into the plastic cloud pump.
Our mats ascend on pillars
into our own private sky
as the delicate light
catches in the vapor.
We’re commanded to contort
as Coach says, “A little Essence of Writhe”
sheepish and sinister
before we’re gone——pistoned
into the blue——city like
a child’s block game below.
The others already engaging
in two point contact yoga, or else
late romance somatic
as linen sheets of faded colors blow
around no body except what is perfectly fed.
Coach’s tattoo bleeds under his bandage
as he scream his body into a worse shape.
Hawks circle in rising heat
like we’re facing some final boss of self, or else
my hip-flexer’s stabbing pain.
Small pebbles prod
my spine because comfort is gauche.
The holograms ticker in faded pink over us.
Flashing lights optimize
our mood. Coach floats over
to adjust the dune
inside me, which collapses
in the proverbial dead
channel dial-up.
We move together in scrap balance.
My body in Warrior III
like a class project
mobile of flesh puppets
my shit reach
toward the wall mirror, which mocks
our attempts at collectivization.
I am the clotted sieve
for their particulate——I look
for another knowing eye,
but they’re too lost in their work and bodies,
or else a thinly disguised will
to dominate all life.
The metal in the bone
behind my ear
doesn’t it like it too much, but utters
instructions: “You are the ghost moth
hugging moon.” No one knows
how to turn it off.
Trashbot corporations
folded, the engineers turn to farm.
Machines dumber than we thought
curve their angles
into a simple loop.
I am fanciful and glib.
Among the crowd
it’s how you survive.
Or else hacked banal
until I can only link pinkies
with my lover to at least know and feel.
Eyes white with email
in the cool down——little white
frigates over the pupil’s Black Sea.
I mathematize how I might
reconstruct after this——like
how many bones are left?
The companies will take the garbage
we fell in love with with them.
Left with only a feeling
like a nagging scratch
at where a memory was,
or a promised imagining hid.
Forests burst out of the buildings below.
The animatronics do the herky jerky
and a branch manager plummets.
The physics look too good.
Coach says to have fun with it,
so we laugh in unison
to stretch the throat and face.
There is no beyond. We are merely we.
It's all causal.
Refer back to the hockey stick——
how to be graphed is to be loved.
The idea makes me hot——
hot in the veins like booze.
That’s what we’ll have
on the long table as they paint us
like how in the commercial,
the sparker tip alights the face.
A smile almost real
cuts to a hand rummaging
through a pocket toward something
I thought I lost: the first stars
after a long seasonal day.
You can download it for free.

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Will Vincent's book, Wildfires: I - XVI was published with sPect!. His poems and articles have appeared in Eunoia, The Elephants, Scout, PANK, Entropy, HTML Giant, and The Iowa Review. He co-wrote a short film with Adam Shecter and edited a chapbook of the same title for the video installation New Year, displayed at the 11 Rivington gallery in New York. He lives in Culver City, CA. You can find a link to some of his writing here.

Adam Shecter is a New York based artist and therapist. He has collaborated with Will on a number of projects although a majority of his animations these days are about mental health topics. You can follow him on Instagram @shecter_therapy.

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