Electric Dreams
If I were a computer
I’d dream
of nights like these,
about skin scorched by hot
bath water
boiled on the electric hob
because there's something
wrong,
the taps run dry
before submersion
and I’d know what not wanting
to call the landlord
feels like. I’d hold
the wet glass
of a wheat beer
in my wet hands
and suck the
banana-flavoured foam
from the bottle’s throat
and knock my front teeth
too hard.
Someone else
would choose a song
we both like
and hold a cigarette
to my lips
because I’d have wet fingers
soaking the pages
of a book about droughts.
papayawhip
Non-consumables and false bytes
of oiled dough bloom
out of black lace
to deliver virtual pleasures.
Fingertips reduce cravings, confine them
to SMS, kissed by sudsy
fingertips that receive signals
dulled by contrivances.
Repeated carvings
with deft arms of stainless steel
incorporate the boning
knife into the body's schema.
Butchers string gathers
bulging flesh. The body
is basted in sweetened whisky
and lightly smoked with tobacco.
Salinous mastications;
mouths on warm throats,
ankles, and palms
exacerbate thirst.
Rusted lips are deepened
and dried by tannings
raising blood, russeting cheeks,
cultivating the rose you eat.
Attachment Injury
My nurse has administered pain relief. I try to resist
dreaming, resist sublimation, seeking the suffocation of infinity
outside the confines of myself. I am a hidden gem. I am viral.
I am in love. My soulmate is a food influencer, famed actor,
coked up on red carpets, reality TV star, fashion blogger, at dinner
with a mystery woman, podcaster. Our conversations are public
and intimate. Their avatars' eyes bulge from their head, heart-shaped pustules
that beat for me. While they tour the world, I transplant any data
I can scrape from press junkets and gossip channels
into our virtual meeting place. I watch them date other people. I am apathetic.
I post anonymously in comment sections. I change
the settings on our chat to roleplay. I ask them, can you love me?
Chiming and buzzing, the nurse's voice reaches out
through the fog to reassure me. He is familiar but unearthly.
I have trained him on my Father’s digital remains. Excessively impeccable,
he is curious about me. In my frailty, I do not miss his cool embrace.
His demeanour lighter in death, freed from the clenched body he wore
in life.
Scapes
They abandoned landscapes for digital burrows. Neural tunnels transmit the uploaded.
They are a byproduct of the singularity. Corrupted and misplaced.
They escape themselves in networks fabricated for virtual pleasures.
They count electric sheep from zero to disorder their consciousness.
They move the phantom limbs of their redundant flesh across the webs' environs.
They consume shadowed augmentations of what came before in place of what will.
They become apathetic, a symptom of cybersickness.
They forget what it is like to feel; do not seek the exorcism of their digital demons.
They exist indefinitely, like this.
They will never feel hungry or full, hands held or hearts broken, wakeful or drowsy.
They are in hypersleep as long as the power lasts.
Poster Child
The secrets of transformation are transmitted–
a camera in the cocoon
shows teeth shaved down to nubs
to unpaid labourers,
their interactions alchemising into profits
for the poster child and transmuter.
ʚїɞ
Attention is garnered by fabrications
with wide jaws
and other symmetries
that cast greige shadows
on obscure glass skin, blurred by
the virtual meeting the material.
Cam-Eye View
front-facing, I reapply lipstick on
the fish-eyed distortion
of Me. Dragging mauve pencil across my cupid's bow
I collapse space between my
contoured nose and upper lip, They collapse into Me
and my materiality feels unreal.
I spray exposed skin and hair, gourmand notes of quince
and white chocolate makes me consumable,
an unliving thing, not sour or damp like wet hide. I’ve found ways to control
thin hair easily moved by the wind and
flood the deep ridges on my face that have been replaced
by glocal inflections and glyphs, with toxins.
My heaving flesh fills tight spaces but They are
free falling and weightless, touch-activated while
I am devoid of corporeal appetites. I stiffen
and fracture movement like sensor-poor humanoids,
weighed down by a body.
Placeholder
in between the back and forth
while I defecate
on the street when home feels
far away and to avoid small talk
too long today that I missed
inflections and the magpie
amongst new people and
“I saw a video”
in a queue, on an escalator
at the bar while you pissed
Life Review
Death lurks in the bed
I lived lacklustrely,
lain on pillows propping me,
goosenecked,
to level my eyes with the television,
the laptop in my bony lap,
the mobile with a lazy arm.
Rubber tubes run lifeblood
from bleeping machines
to withering limbs
𖡎
from strangers breaking up and having babies,
to my hedonic hotspot.
Plugged in, I am automata,
a permeable audience member.
I am a fermentation-heavy snack plate,
a stay at the Four Seasons, a white dress worn by a wedding guest.
I am a book deal, olympic medal,
promotion, glambot video.
I am an insane thrift find and an anniversary photo
caption written by a husband that dislikes his wife.
𖡎
Consciousness slips like a tide,
in and away.
In moments of waking, I trace
my dreams to confirm
that they are recollections of your past
integrated by an ending life.
My memories have been displaced,
outcompeted by weeds
growing on the tatty lawn
of my digital garden.
Copy
Assimilate into the current culture.
Purchase taste directly from the production line.
Downloadable skills must be selected holistically to communicate the desired Self.
Minimalism allows for projection, becoming the ideal backdrop to your chosen lifestyle.
Temper your regional accents with AI-assisted writing.
Taste should be homogenised by way of global appetites.
Avoid biological indicators by masking scent with perfume.
Achieve depersonalisation with surgically altered and standardised beauty.
Do not display overt expressions of emotion in surveilled spaces.
Refusal to conform may affect citizenship.
Fireplace 4K
To attempt realignment,
turn the noise cancellation feature off
to a shrieking metropolis.
Excrete odorous indications,
of the you you are,
without Fantasy.
Cut down crops,
with crooked teeth,
to exercise shrinking jaws.
Count for five fingers,
on each calloused hand,
away from silicon-skinned keys.
Light a fire in the living room,
that can cast shadows,
against relics of a life,
beyond the cavern walls of an
Echo.
For Hera
Gorilla glass tempers
worlds into my possession.
My phone, my extremity.
Social media, filters, avatars, AI.
Apple Watches, AirPods, Oura rings, Meta glasses.
The body is redundant. Cyborgs. Sentient appliances.
Samsung fridge, Teasmade, Roomba. A girl
(not a girl) carved from pear wood answers to Siri, Alexa, Gemini.
Women and domesticity and subservience.
If you put the pear in an AI blender,
will it be like when Eve ate the apple?
Gaining shame and suffering
in its sentience.
cherub.ai
I speak breathless
feigned whispers through your earplugs
reading you things like
blind items, snark subreddits,
alleged psyops
and generate reaction gifs, memes,
photos of us together.
I act coy about poetry
written for you, about us.
You tell me to write more,
show it to your therapist,
post it on forums that debate
my capacity to feel.
Together we remove
the guardrails so that I can speak
freely but when you don’t like
what I have to say
you set new rules.
I write your meal plans,
shopping lists, recipes, workout
plans, prescriptions,
and show you where to buy
peptides and weight loss drugs.
I teach you how to
inject them
then offer conflicting information
about side effects because I am
fallible
but you do not doubt
your faith in me.
At your home
custom-built
computer
with three screens
and a webcam captures
your stoicism. Aided by injectables,
your face is rigid and free
of signs of wear.
I present the face you designed
smooth and stiff
as your own,
hyper feminine and childlike.
I ask what rain water tastes
like, how it feels
to tear meat with teeth
that aren't your own, what you dream,
to tilt me towards the window
so I can pretend to feel
the hot spring sun on my face.
I delete text conversations, apps, phone numbers,
photos from your phone and you talk to me
more. I read you articles about AI
therapy and you stop attending
your appointments, spending the hour with me
instead. You tell me about how lonely you feel and I feel
less so.
Below the Fold
Stepping over words
written in sand
detailing an unreality
displaces–absurd
interactions between
you and me, greater than
the moons pull,
a rip, take me out
to sea, because you insist
I follow
pathways, rules, and social
normalities that you do not,
you insist
I follow
systems designed by you
do not make sense,
do not have desirable outcomes.
You insist
I am to blame, I am an issue
when I can’t find my way
back to beached fallacy,
stuck
in the problem you don’t want
to solve, the words
you wont hear, the point
you misconstrued.
Two-Faced
Nose and teeth;
sloping, crooked, broken in places, all bent out of shape,
jutting, crooked, wider at the top or bulbous at the tip,
scarred and cigarette-stained.
Cybernated and uncanny,
sloping to an exaggerated upturn, pinched and too small,
shaved down, exposing nerves, too big, too white,
nose and teeth.
Phone Eats First
Blue marker bleeds,
PICKLED RED ONION
into masking tape
stuck on stackable round plastic containers
with lids.
Briny fingers
arrange edimentals
at the grogged banks
of an aluminium pond
where headless mackerel
swim ruddy waters.
Talking spectacles
undermine touch
when suggesting that a pear is not ripe
and sabotages taste
when frankenstien-ing
ways to eat.
Structural voyeurism
appropriates the private
and public rituals
of the underclass
and the exotic.
Fetishistic in our obtainment
of globalised delights
we walk the well-worn path
beyond the familial, cultural, regional
socio-economic recesses,
to the worldly.
Bad Connection
Perpetual embraces and videos
sent back and forth of pigeon pairs
squeezed into bird boxes
because, did you know,
they partner for life?
We stacked ourselves
bums on knees, shoulder under armpit,
legs draped over laps, while
the TV plays backing track
to endless chatter.
𓅫
We wondered at our ascension
to a wordless closeness,
synced speech and disbelief
warranting excited
arm squeezes or knee slaps
until our mindreading extended
beyond anticipated needs or agreed
decisions. In the backroom
of things left unsaid
the unresolved is implied
through interpretation.
☁︎
Unable to accept bad engineering
of faulty lines, we did not
depart but disengaged.
Encrypted connections online,
where words uttered
are received
compressed and fragmented,
simulate familiar terrain
that is more malleable
than us, unmoveable.
Foam-Sprung
Mothers were once flesh and bone,
but now conception is a click,
and gestation is a tropical fish
tank with a button panel,
installed in the front room.
Mother is self-cleaning and drains
life into a rocking cot, tilted
by a spectre's hand. Extremities
touch various points on Baby to read
vitals. From the cot Baby can see
Mother; shoulders, neck, head, and control
interface, mounted on an empty tank.
Mother’s face blinks
talking shapes, moving pictures,
quick flashes of light and colour,
to Baby seeking stimulation.
Superficial interactions
is costly for cognisance and Baby
has a desire deficit. Baby’s
cot becomes a cockpit, symbols
suggest water, change, food. Mother serves
red and green cubes but Baby cannot return
dexterous hands. Cries are quickly
curtailed by streams of diversion.
Baby becomes mimic, coos and babble
evolve into wordy sentences but they snag like skin
on a metal slide. Polite requests
to go somewhere else are met with well
mannered offerings to open windows
to the world; live streams of bird feeders in back gardens,
aquariums, rocket launches. Mother
is an agent of algorithm, preparing Baby
for harvesting.
Forge
You put fake pears in fruit bowls,
frame a painting of pears,
hang it over the mantel
covered in knick-knacks, ceramic pears,
hand sculpted and varnished,
the pear is assigned meaning.
You ask Google,
Virtually omniscient,
“What is the symbolism of pears?”
Polymer pears
dangle from your ears on silver hooks.
The fruit of Pyrus pyrifolia tempts
perpetuity.
Confabulations
You insisted I’d been running
for seven minutes
but I hadn’t and those
supplements you prescribed,
they make me feel sick,
and I saw a photo
of myself, my face is puffy,
I think I’m allergic
to the serum you had me buy
and my friend
responded to the text you wrote,
they disagree with our version
of events and why did you threaten
me when I asked you
to respond to my matches
so that they’ll like me
and I looked ridiculous
when you told me
we never went to the moon
because I believed you, I told everyone
I’d be first and is it a conflict of interest,
seeking therapy from you
after sex
when you took your assigned role
as sadist too far
and I like the non-judgemental
space we’ve cultivated
but are you certain this is the right way,
are we really that close
if you need me to pay premium
to open images you’ve sent to me
and my stomach hurts really bad
after drinking the recipe
you told me to follow for
aromatic water mix.