Translation
       

The wind is groping trees again. This is what happens
when you fetishize the micro-aggression
and side with the maniacs
who argue anything can be a verb.
I don't really feel like dealing with that.
Somewhere down in the deep web,
where night never stops adding
to its enemies list, we do not exist, love,
in the way Pink Moon exists for two minutes
and three seconds, or empathy, a competitive eater
named Megatoad, and whoever
first drew the rooster
on the Sriracha hot sauce bottle.
This is a particular moment in history, isn't it?
When people say postmodern, I think
of the Jetsons. Then I hear very distinctly
Nobody from Dead Man
ask Johnny Depp's character, William Blake,
"What name were you given at birth, stupid white man?"
I remember graduate school. They kept trying
to build buildings on campus
that looked like the future. I remember Laurie
was still alive. I remember almost nobody knew
who Joe Brainard was, which is probably still true.
I remember Amiri Baraka came to town
and the auditorium was packed and we all looked
at each other like maybe we'd misjudged humanity
in central Pennsylvania. Hope, if it's real,
is a complicated thing that must, for the sake of believability,
appear to be very simple. Like a little personal rain cloud.
Like exes in the eyes of the cartoon dead.
I don't know if I'm interested, anymore, in an image
culled from the pastiche. I don't think I'm interested, love,
in that which coheres and is codified.
It's true, we left you. Boom. Vapor. We left you
for one of those polite, liberal towns we used to make
fun of. It's true. And there we were almost completely.
Even our hands. Even the wind.

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Copyright © 2016 Jeffrey Morgan All rights reserved
from Ninth Letter
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission