As if our Future Past Bore a Bad Algorithm

A few particles ambushed the past
I opened my mouth to laugh and laughter
fell from the television
I said to myself
it’s almost better than real sugar
This happened yesterday as I traded
my own scalp for grain

Gold loaded our skulls
onto the backs of the born
and no credit was given
where no credit was due

Expectation
having grown so heavy
in its basement

*

In between accident and arrival
we are suspended
A significant horizon of downcast fire
in a public moment
my head tilted to the side
like, what?
The cogito
is the body
is nature
is the backward glancing continuum of Western history
writ in blood?

It’s as if these winters have nothing on a chin
tilted upward
speaking plainly, it is easier to tide
the lunar part
We are bound
and the world is what I can feel
up against this boundary
The sentence
becomes my future mail, my student debt,
these heads of nine crows I retreat
into storage

Scrolling through the temple of your name
I become locked into the commute of this
falling night
still dressed for the office
with my thighs awake
As if any art could reify
what time has taken away
The fact so brief I could not see
the temporal bind in front
of my face

*

History could be
my mother smoking in her truck
out a cracked window
The bluish greys eddying
toward escape
as all known stars accelerate
A bloodstream of dark matter
and the truth I’ll never contain

In another history
a grandmother sleeps on a bed of hay
while the night sky screams a green light
of solar rays. Across the province
a grandmother picks burrs from her worn skirt
in a shack at the edge of the reserve.
A moose has been shot but where does she go
for her water?

Here I am filming my mother this past summer
demonstrating for a young cousin how to witch
for a well:

“Hold a saw by its edge with both hands
and bring the handle up to your chest
let it fall then count the bounces
that’s how many feet down the water is”

*

The future history of mind
takes everything to forgive
the impulse to rue the day
I met you at the university
I cannot make peace with that
which will not leave me
to test the surface tension
of deeper blues

If I hollow the morrow could you love me
as the poppet of your lost youth?

I can make an occasion of the hour known as 3 a.m.
for us to seep so readily into confusion

A young man pisses on the sidewalk in front of us
unknowingly
pushing a gasp up from his throat before he cuts
and runs down the residential street

Could it be that I’ve lived too long
with an idle mouth and my boots untied?

The bones of some medieval boy
discovered in the dying lips
of an uprooted tree
in the news today

Call me a taxi when the dawn is incendiary
the green of this could never have known me
not entirely

Dream apartments we could live in but never rent
The sun hunts me and everything I hold against my sense