Lance Newman

Console Wild

Canyon odysseys on LifeProofed® tablets

wind up at waypointed photo lookouts.

There’s just hills out there. It’s only darkness.

Tango for the LAN party guerillas.

My world’s people use virtual water

to dazzle your world’s lifeless consumers.

They click-bait Amazon’s slack-jawed masses

on smartphones that need gestural input.

I just don’t know if I’d recognize dawn

on a tablet where bayonets and drones

mutilate rows of groaning avatars.

My feet, my mouth, which one is up? Bodies

can be quite the self-propagating meme.

Would a trip to the augmented snow help?

Let’s summit a Microsoft peak after

breakfast. Let’s plunder our senses. Let’s play.

I want conversational images

and a nice natural interface please.

Siri reads my poems. She leads me home.

What wonders is she dashing off in there?

I’m just a voice in space pinned on the cusp

of surrender. Go ahead and comment.

Found: Objects

What is the human running gait on flat terrain

in the presence of food, disease, and biface tools?

Personal integrity means walking walking

through an anti-microbial wall of sound.

In Tallahassee the people study sinkholes

defined by the absence of skulls, of ash, of life.

Will we catch the meta-organisms that suck

our health? And when the pendulum contacts the ground

will we excavate the Gulf? Will we understand

that time has leveled ancient pits with lost species?

Either I’m stoned or this groove is inanimate.

Can we classify some artifacts: tusk, bone, chert?

Someone’s mission can be carrying animals

and plants uphill. Bipeds think soil’s a behavior

and climate’s a knife pulled through meat. Digging disrupts

the evidence. Science lumps fossils with waste flakes.

Factor in asthma and I’ll dive for mastodons.

What’s true of humankind is dirt, oceans, and bugs.

Earth Day

                                                                                  after Joanne Kyger

April sap rises

in optical fiber.

Pixely starlings pose

on a branch, mocking time.

My online narcissus

patch blooms with opinions.

The comments thread is all

about sex and surveillance.

Do I need permission

to open my umbrella?

Believe me, in the grave

ritual of cell phone

photos, a bad selfie

can sprout a crop of ashes.

I dream in formulas

and ache for a whiff of soil.

Imagine growing kale

through interrogations.

Gardens are to privilege

as poems are to memory.

Wait. This tune’s getting too blue.

Time to trot out a joke.

Will I know a local tree

in the retouched pictures I see

or fly in a nightmare

to a blurry white somewhere?

Another electric emotion.

My desktop’s as blank as the ocean.

Monitor Weather

                                                                                                            after Amy King

Was I hit in a cyberbreach,

a Juneteenth license downpour?

Office webcams show thousands

of dead and wounded profiles.

On that particular Thursday

millions were hacking nighttime

power to detect storms on the grid.

I heard gunshots in the humid

wind of a celebration of rage,

a sprawling brushfire of data

timed for rush-hour traffic.

Some are drivers and some victims.

Should I risk a crowded online

mall to arrest the web police?

Not just anyone is peaceful enough

to tingle at the sound of software

raining suspects down like shells.

I ransom my customers during planned

outages and blame the breach on drought.

Resilience

Is water thinner when

depositing coastlines?

Do emails seek their own level?

School is a bright

current of self-excavations

rising to years of burden.

I make paper offerings

to an unknown sea

soaked with advice.

Does a century of stone

gates promise us home

when work floods cities

with slabs of understanding?

The usual countries

like their everyday rituals

while walls in the desert

remain walls and concrete

threatens fragments of water.

That other thick fabric,

writing, tries for a parched

rectangle of digital coasts,

managed for animal needs,

heaped with triaged patients.

How can I decide

when the mystery of patience

has sedimented my inbox

with old notes to self?