FIVE POEMS

Vegging Out WhitmanLorcaPopeye Hermes TrismegistusL. Frank Baum Teach me your green-bloodedanthems. Find me a jobin an oxygen factory convertingplanks of light. Green Tara’smantra is circulating. The Green Man is lost in the valleyof the Jolly Green Giant. The Green Lantern is hanging outalong Green Dolphin Street. The Green Lion sleepson the uncut hair of graves. There, There The machineshave been dreaming us again. Smooth, life-like, transparent. The machines(can we really still call them that?) won’t need their own bodies—carapace, casing, keyboard. They’ll have us to monitor. Our vital human music to soothetheir dystopian nightmares. We will not need the old languagethey took and ground to numeric sand. We will understand each otherperfectly. We Don’t Need Another Psychic To tell us we’re fucked. Who would buy a record of every stupid question we ever asked? A list of every drug we’ve ever taken? A catalogue of all the miracle products we bought that never worked;the…