tonight all the lights are gone
i unscrewed the bulbs
and put them in the corner
like dumb children
now every room glows like a church
by carpetgush and infomercial alone
this is the setting for a poem where you finally leave me
alone with all the stupid refrigerator smell
like a dumptruck filled with gobs of purple
slaughtered moon just sitting there
sometimes when the lights are gone
and i am writing exceptionally sad poetry
i receive a cache of truly epic feelings
and i write them down as they appear
i want to eat tree guts
i want to witness an explosion
i want to dance all night at a rave
and get my brain hopelessly lit
on many kinds of drugs
one for each letter of the alphabet
i want to dance at a rave and have a heart attack
and be brought back to life in a strange environment
that is eerily repressive toward the human spirit
i want to write a poem that walks like ASIMO
because there is no way to know
if such a poem will affect you for good or ill
you would not know for instance
if this robot has come to enslave you
if he has a switch of slaughtered moon in his brain
or if he will just walk and observe
affecting you somewhat tangentially
in the arbitrary world of the intellect
if you loved me would you write a poem
with this kind of stupid, forthright honesty ?
would you employ a cataclysmic metaphor
to describe your hopelessness and suicidal demeanor ?
you could write
i feel a tremendous burst of the forlorn
when ASIMO falls it is like my entire being
is a cruel, cruel sphincter absorbing the present tense
of all pain and alienation and it ferments
uselessly in my healing cavities
and we could spend hours writing letters in blood
hey let’s write letters in our blood
and dance totally naked
in the first episcopalean church
and give our healing cavities up to ASIMO
as an offering so he doesn’t enslave us
and if you loved me then you’d say
that the robot is not a robot at all
but really a collective sum
of many human thoughts
and that the human thoughts are lights
firing off so tiny in the brain
like a thousand flailing glow sticks
in completely impossible colors
and you know after tonight
each thought will fade
and you have to make new ones
you must make a dumptruck of new ones
more than anything else
this is the edict of the rave
even if the rave is a metaphor
or a for-real rave with all the drugs
and lights and comfort of human noise
it’s the same effect
you have to make more thoughts
you must burn like a church
you must return from a heart attack
willing to lead the human race
you must walk like ASIMO
all the time
otherwise it dies
James Schiller lives in Milwaukee and writes poems. He would like to meet you and push you down and then pick you back up so later you can have an interesting story about how you became friends.
