RAT CODE
There are new seasons by courtesy of neglect
And the holes in our skin do not tell the time.
I visited a site of recent failure.
The only thing I saw were people that were dead.
I came back embalmed in their love
and this is an exaggeration made of nothing but words
and people often quote me in their dreams.
When you get back we’ll feed the tarmac into our brains,
persuade the ground that we can swim.
Is it capable of listening?
Can it tell she has bad teeth and hasn’t hatched in a week?
In the impurities of god we parasite our story.
We use Cold War jargon because no worm survived.
We find a pleasing economy in the language of killers.
Don’t listen to the industry danger these returns.
Our evacuation fills a jungle of machines.
The hardest thing is the wood in our necks.
Avoid the chemistry of singing.
Accent the critical flowers.
Breathe the buried dog.
Make the accident berserk with nails.
The prospect of outside gets submerged.
It seems this gouged meat holds air.
This virility is a facsimile of sewage.
Perhaps I can populate a panic-stricken mother
running at the door with her factory,
snot like wool from her nose.
Perhaps I can populate her shreds.
Perhaps I can populate Fontaine
and feed from the door with a spoon.
The people make fences or the fences make people.
That’s my transaction of indifference.
I chew at my circuits for function.
The drama of place is a melted proof.
We inherit ourselves yellowing in cartoonish sweat,
our bodies poor furniture for reluctant strumming.
Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals, and co-author of Necrology. He has work that has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Black Herald, New Dead Families, le Zaporogue, Gargoyle, nthposition, elimae, la Granada, and others. He is on the editorial board of the arts journal SCRIPT. More details can be found here.
