Two Poems
One With Which I Open
Where my rage is listening
At the shoreline its form takes
The shape of an obvious fate
Hands plunged into the silt
Of the future retrospective
Alchemy, “me,” vomiting on a hill
Top heavy with shame in sunset’s
Righteous light, finding it honest
To cross with desire
My amplitude undoes the borders’
Haptic feedback through which I
Double, like being seen at a distance
I like being watched in this form
The only one with which I open
My own mouth to spit in it
And empty the first person
Trespassing in the dream of
My body going no place with a name
from The Streamers
//
There’s a problem with the stream
I mean my system’s problem is that
It’s both mimetic of its form and not
Allowed the means to strategically combat
Its meaning, reliant on the conditional
If it continues, the poem will not be
A science glittering in the dark
Cultivated style matching its shadow
Architecture I assembled against expression
Unwillingness to speak in the dopaminergic
Cloud signals flooding content at will
Analgesia formed in the hours whiled
Even prior to the drive they shape
Making the tongue hang limp
In the already insufficient mouth
Which I excuse myself with, sorry chat
Just one sec I’ll be back
Through light-by-light scattering
//
I woke at the break of dawn
And pressed play, a fleeting thing
A thread of time-bound light
Drained of a parallel inner life
The birds are singing falsely in
The eclipsed sky, signals out of time
An apparition, a ring, for what
Reason does the moon have at all
To make demands on me, move
Against inertia and with the tide
Rising steadily in cadence with
New opportunities for
Mental health app developers
Blink once for yes, twice for
Auto-erotic electrical pulsing
As stochastic interval
As formally undone property
Of the body stained by longing
In the temporal lobe, assume me
To be piecewise polynomial
Globally smooth, I guess, mostly just
Hanging out, as planes circle over
Gliding under trochaic night
//
Still, if not for you, I would give up
The essence of description, leaves
Trembling in the digital wind
Alike in kind and same as the price
Of real wind, it’s simple economics
That the unending flow of the words
Long to graft onto, a subject
Aches to mirror unnoticed
In the city we do it all the time
Simulated or otherwise, aimlessly I
Mimic the expression of your private
Sensations, progenitive POV we’re
Exhausting the limits of prose
To run ads where I’m wearing
Solitude as an outmoded form
Of dress nostalgia wrapped itself in
Sweating through the anachronism
To linger as a thumbnail
Replayable when the narrative needs
To link revenue with form
Between where the video ends
And criticism begins
Today I’m going live at 7 PM
Just for you, it’s all because of you, I must
Thank you for the Twitch Prime subscription
//
A weakness is a poetics.
This is the self-governing glow I now undress in,
illuminated in the Commons
the body can take anything
inside itself, though I’m too shy
to admit the lengths
I’ve gone to for my research
monograph, an auto-ethnography
of quivering at the psychic root
system, reviewed by esteemed peers
whose jaws soften at the sight
of phase changes, the pressure altering
method April bends the air
and my arms with, lying prone and
desalinated in my view count
But having been nowhere for so long
retreading the illegible buffering sunlight,
being rendered future continuous, I will be
waiting my only hours to begin the first line
∩
Daniel Baker is a poet from San Francisco. He is the author of The Streamers (forthcoming from Spiral Editions) and the co-editor of Topos Press. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Baffler, Annulet, Denver Quarterly, Works & Days, and other publications. He lives in New York.