Eric Lehman



The Colony of Multiplicity

The maroon crayfish stack like zombie troops,
Multilegged army poised on a tray, untouched,
Huge pink slices of sopping vodkamelon,
A steamy marijuana afternoon, the endless grilling
Of raw meat, rare spice, and orange buffalo sauce,
Burrow into another amber beerbubble night.
The cold cities of our minds, skyscraper thoughts,
Melt to become the hot dendrites of our breath.

On the aluminum lawnchairs slump bodies, waiting,
Smelling the searing sizzle of frying chickenfat
Or the airborne froth of clinking mugs, waiting
For the instant when our life machines connect,
Hook cables, and intersect in sharp segments.
This moment is the place from which all others grow.
From here we send bright neurons outward
Spreading like hot mustard on the flesh of maps.

As the lime backyard disappears with starlight,
Bright hospital kitchen and greasy porch empty
Into the fading human faces lit by slight reflection.
The world becomes us in a rush of charcoal flame.
Surplus crusts of the roast succumb to insects,
Leaving only the future, when we shall surely drink
The bitter grains of landscape and build
Colonies between the cells of dreams.






Paleontology

The brown-cast, prehistoric tiger skull
Rests on the shelf, to remind that we, too,
Wander in pathless desert voids of time,
Lost in the currents of tectonic plates.

That brief hesitation before touching
Tells histories of fractions, lone, silent,
Just as throat muscles clenched when asked to sing.

Great dissolving distances stretch between
Those who challenge the carnivorous fish
That swim sad, ancient oceans, that chew flesh
Piece by piece, like moments torn by absence.

And, perched on old driftwood like starving gulls,
We settle for the sea-hewn frame of life,
The scattered bones of some vague animal.






The Night

Old stars twinkle, small fairies in the dark;
The moon spins like a fan

with long slow strokes.
A sparrow flies into an open mouth;
The way you look at me
silences fear.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Singularity

There is revolt within our poor biology
from the hard and definite blue-lined diagrams of science.
But the wheel has turned, the rocket fired,
and the snake-haired screen has captured
all hope within the dancing pixels,
fixing mute carnal reception into stony words.

And thus satellite siren-songs enter the macropolis of minds,
a hospital-clean injection of microchips
into the bloodstream. A fear within a sunbeam.
Can we perceive these cold staccato signals?
Should the information be stored and processed?
Is the current disk drive valid?

How tempting to let essence drift into corrosive collectivity.
Roaming through starfield forests, attempting the hopeless adaptation,
the leafy megamix of culture denies communion with the muse.
Instead, we let the killers of the inner supervise our definitions,
we join with the cosmontrosity, lulled to the dead event horizon.
Automated oracle: list your vision here.

And yet the need remains
to see our gruesome shadows on the moon.
Small pagan thoughts eat through metal skin,
while magic becomes technique
with precise spiderlike mutation.

What apple is that? What golden fleece
breaks the Argo-journey with its call?
How do the lasers of the watchsystem
clash with radiowaves leaping through the hall?

What is the fear that stops the universe from growing?

Uselessness.

Within the icy temple vaults beneath the mountains wait our replacements.
Huge crypts of genetic code, sepulchres of double-helix bytes,
hunch with Titan power to transform the lifeforce structure.
But how can we unearth hearts that once crushed empires?
Now hydra wires form the system by which
the stars are charted, atoms fractured, humans bonded.

If X-ray machines could show the cancerous topography of time,
perhaps the days would seem less lonely. Perhaps.

The orange of the evening gives way to oceans of white lightbulbs.
Blood pumps and shoots electrons through our molecules
and we must decide how to worship the radiation in our veins.
Decide not to fear the cyborg night.
Acknowledge a dominion of mirrors.
Eat synthetic fruit.
And puke the anti-poem of hate
at demi-humans that kill freedom
with their insidious ordering of reality.

Become the user.






e-mail the poet at elehman@bridgeport.edu
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