I desire oblivion over pleasure, mistook desire for pleasure then mistook
oblivion for desire, automation for passion, coffee for desire, carrying a saucer of cereal
sinking in milk, silk ray of coffee and some horror
seen by many as rational choice, automation as inevitable, the unpeeling petals
where subject should be the radiation, the coffee, frittered desire over the void
markets rise like dead planets between our eyes
until the very end, analysts say, rays unfold from the terminus of rays as circles of gold
cream crosshatch each other in the coffee, pleasure like the rotten styrofoam of a simile
production exceeded production, all targets lost, in the union of I don’t know what
but it’s happening, coffee, extinction, desire cascades, arcades, barcades
barricades, I mean desire ruptures in the surfeit of itself, mercury coffee
forfeited velvet pivoted from prolepsis, zeppelins of void seen
as known, known as seen, is as will, the rhythm, breakfast
da fireballs, da poem w/history, da vortex, lockdown
double column or circumambient arc of flame
shatter, ocean, time, you grinder, thrush
brush, abrasive, abrazos, let us go
like D writes, what if we
could start again
in the cheap seats where nobody cares
if you stand for the anthem
(Mayer? Waldman?) as a trepanned
dome, gold flakes blown
onto the brain’s soft working tissue
the wild atmosphere’s radius
touches the mind, if we could start again
shotgunning hand sanitizer or huffing emerald dust
if I have said fireballs, I meant you
if I have said garden, I meant
a wet biochemical weave
of mycelia and roots walled
from arguments about property and the lyrical
working self, if I have said I’ve wasted
my life in poems, I meant today is day
41 of lockdown, waste is a
form of devotion, to what, to who
the answer is not Da Fugue Zone
in a current, green, without currency
this debt red credit eating credit
what if you could not pay me for this music?
state this loss, exchange, exchange, loss this, state
starts at fee, got to buy an ‘r’, under a
red tree, your laugh at last springs the register
off the market, though you forgot to
pay the machine to re-enact your loss, one
by one, shopping carts pool at the bottom green
endless accreditation to touch
what if I am still born in a loop of
threadbare anyone: loans owned my no, my
cold-grown hand rot to stinking bones, owns my
Joe Hall is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Someone’s Utopia (2018). He has toured nationally, performing and delivering talks at universities, living rooms, squats, and/or rivers in most of the 50 states as well as Canada and Washington, DC. Hall has taught community based creative writing workshops through the Worker Center in Buffalo and Just Buffalo Literary Center.