Lullaby
Cars appear as white light, sliding then fading
along their paths, buckling darkly and blue.
In the day the road is all curve, tar-black
and heatwave sliding down to the ocean.
There was only one direction but now
you can confuse the bulbs with stars, there is
upwardness here, not the expansiveness of the sea
but the delusive weightlessness of a lamp at night
trapping everyone in its glow. Sleep.
The island doesn’t need you, it will burn with
or without your knowledge, the black charred wood
will turn white with the marble, the ash
will cover the ground like feathers, and it will be
dark outside this room, everything will seem
black and white, but the colors are there
but you will have to wait
until there is more light to see.
The Birth of Futurism
Every time his fingers twitch he is thinking about folding a butterfly wing in half, and in half again into a small rectangle of creases and then dropping it into his pocket. He will convince you that it was your idea. You keep your hands closed. He keeps his eyes closed, cataracts, like opals, that everyone strains to see when his lids flutter. He keeps them closed. He runs a small museum, Maritime History, where he stores torpedoes, sliced open and wired tightly with coils of red and blue, like capillaries. There is one room full of seashells, just seashells. All of them delicate and white and lit by electricity and a sense of what feels like vertigo, but is really just the potential of so many brittle bodies with rooms like cupboards inside of them. The fact that you could shatter them all. You touch his face, and then hold your hand a moment apart, hovering between sliding down to his neck to rest your palm around the nape like he is some handful of animal about to buck, or pull away. His breathing is too loud for this room and your body is too large, the broad metal chests of his machines hum behind the glass like the souls of the creatures that lived in the seashells, like invitations to violence.
